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May 27, 2019 - Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
01:39:03
Stephen Hicks: Postmodernism: Reprise
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Dr.
Stephen R.C. Hicks is professor of philosophy at Rockford University, Illinois, USA, executive director of the Center for Ethics and Entrepreneurship and senior scholar at the Atlas Society.
He received his bachelor's and master's degrees from the University of Guelph in Canada and his PhD in philosophy From Indiana University, Bloomington, USA. He's published four books translated into 16 different languages.
In 2004 and expanded in 2011, he published Explaining Postmodernism, Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault.
In 2010, he published Nietzsche and the Nazis.
In 1994, with the second edition in 1998, he published The Art of Reasoning, Readings for Logical Analysis, co-edited with David Kelly.
And he published, what year was Entrepreneurial Living published?
16.
2016.
In 2016 he published Entrepreneurial Living, co-edited with Jennifer Harrell.
He's also published in academic journals such as Business Ethics Quarterly, Teaching Philosophy, and Review of Metaphysics, as well as other publications such as The Wall Street Journal, Cato Unbound, and The Baltimore Sun.
In 2010, he won his University's Excellence in Teaching Award.
He has been Visiting Professor of Business Ethics at Georgetown University in Washington DC, a Visiting Fellow at the Social Philosophy and Policy Center in Bowling Green, Ohio, Senior Fellow at the Objectivist Center in New York, and Visiting Professor at the University of Casimir the Great in Poland.
Dr.
Hicks' work on postmodernism Explaining Postmodernism, Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau de Foucault.
That's the 2011 book.
That in particular has been quite controversial.
So I thought we'd open with that.
Good.
Thanks for having me.
You published Explaining Postmodernism in 2011 in the revised version.
How has it been selling, first of all?
What sort of reaction are you garnering?
Yeah, sales have been steady, which is gratifying for an academic book.
And then in the last, I would say, three to four years, sales have picked up again just because postmodernism has spilled out from being a primarily intellectual movement to a more broadly As a result of that, I'd say the reactions have been strongly polarized, particularly among philosophers.
The reactions tend to be positive as we talk with intellectuals outside of the area of philosophy.
The reactions start to become More mixed to outright hostile.
And then also, interestingly, among the broadly thinking public, there's been a lot of response to it.
So all of that's been gratified.
Again, of course, the reactions are polarized because postmodernism is a very strong, vigorous movement that makes some very Audacious in my view destructive claims and then as we're seeing when they spill out into the cultural arena People realize the stakes are high and we have the usual kinds of social media debates that we have I'm going to do something terrible here.
I'm going to start again.
I'm sorry my my My recorder my audio recorder wasn't functioning.
Okay, so Well, that way I'll get the intro right, anyways, with 2016.
So that'll be some small benefit to doing it, and it's only about five times extra.
So apologies for that.
No problem.
That's our warm-up.
So in 2016, there we go, Entrepreneurial Living, co-edited with Jennifer Harrell.
All right.
So we'll start that again.
Steven R.C. Hicks is professor of philosophy at Rockford University, Illinois, USA, executive director of the Center for Ethics and Entrepreneurship and senior scholar at the Atlas Society.
He received his bachelor's and master's degree from the University of Guelph in Canada and his PhD in philosophy from Indiana University, Bloomington, USA. He's published four books translated into 16 different languages.
In 2004 and expanded in 2011, he published Explaining Postmodernism, Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault.
In 2010, Nietzsche and the Nazis In 1994, with a second edition in 1998, he published The Art of Reasoning, Readings for Logical Analysis, co-edited with David Kelly.
And in 2016, Entrepreneurial Living, co-edited with Jennifer Harrell.
He's published in academic journals such as Business Ethics Quarterly, Teaching Philosophy, and Review of Metaphysics, as well as other publications such as The Wall Street Journal, Cato Unbound, and The Baltimore Sun.
In 2010, he won his university's Excellence in Teaching Award.
Dr.
Hicks has been visiting professor of business ethics at Georgetown University in Washington DC, a visiting fellow at the Social Philosophy and Policy Center in Bowling Green, Ohio, senior fellow at the Objectivist Center in New York, and visiting professor at the University of Casimir the Great, Poland.
So welcome today and thank you very much for agreeing to talk with me again.
Well, thanks for having me back.
Yeah, it's a real pleasure.
Um, I thought we might start by talking about Explaining postmodernism again your 2011 book skepticism and socialism from Rousseau to Foucault because I know that it's been Perhaps more controversial of late than it was when you originally published it.
I'm curious about the sales and the academic and the public reaction.
Well, sales have been strong.
The book was originally published in 2004 and sold steadily for the first decade or so, which is quite gratifying for an academic book.
And then, starting about three years ago, in part because postmodernism started to spill out of the strictly academic intellectual world into the broader cultural world, Sales picked up again, so there's been a two-front set of discussions, one at the intellectual level and one at the more thinking public level as well.
Gratifyingly, lots of translations.
I think there will be three more translations added this year.
Arabic, Hebrew, and Estonian are in the works, so all together I'm pleased with that.
The reactions are quite polarized, in part because reactions to postmodernism itself are polarized.
It's an extreme movement as good, deep thinking should be, even if I disagree fundamentally with postmodernism.
It is a well-articulated, negative outlook on most of life's philosophical questions, and so we should expect Any movement that pushes buttons fundamentally like that should get some extreme reactions.
And the same thing holds for me when I push back against, in my book, some of these strong, to my mind, ultimately nihilistic claims that postmodernism ends up making.
I also get the negative pushback.
The pushback kind of comes in two forms.
I've found from the professional reviews.
There have been eight, to my knowledge, by professional philosophers in the philosophy journals, and they are generally strong to very strongly positive.
The normal scholarly quibbles arise.
When I get pushback from, sorry, reviews from academics outside of the philosophy, they tend to be more polarized, some strongly in favor, But then particularly people in history, in sociology, in rhetoric studies and literature, places where there are stronger contingents of postmodern thinkers tend to get strongly negative responses.
And those responses are also mirrored in the general thinking public when they respond and write back and write reviews.
Maybe it would be useful To bring people up to date, for you to give us a brief overview of your view of postmodernism, like a definition.
It's one of those tricky terms like existentialism or phenomenology that are bandied about by people, educated people on a fairly regular basis, but where the definition itself is slippery and difficult to pin down.
So talk a little bit about how you view postmodernism and also What argument you made with regards to the history of its development?
Right.
Well, it makes sense that it's slippery, in part because postmodernism philosophically avoids categorizations, avoids broad sweeping statements, although they do make some.
So anytime you try to make a precise, broad sweeping claim about what this postmodernism amounts to, you will get pushback on that.
There is a broadly unifying set of themes to post-modernism.
If you start by breaking the term down, it's post-modernism.
So first you have to say what is modernism such that post-modernism is reacting against it or saying that we need to go beyond.
And modernism is used variously in different fields.
There's modernism in art, in literature.
I'm using a philosophical and historical Understanding of postmodernism and that's how it's mostly used now.
That is to say we look at the modern world.
So that essentially is the last four to five hundred years of history, at least in the in the Western tradition.
So what's going on in the world 500 years ago is a revolutionary transformation of Western society.
We have Columbus crossing the ocean and so we're entering into a new era of Of globalization.
The Renaissance is in full swing and its impact, late 1400s, early 1500s, is now being felt all over Europe.
There is the Protestant Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, so religious life in the West is being dramatically You see the beginnings of science with thinkers like Copernicus and Vesalius in anatomy.
And so scientific method is being developed and all of the things that we now recognize as the scientific disciplines are being founded.
So that's the modern world starting four or five hundred years ago.
Philosophically, we start looking at the analyses that are being offered by thinkers like Francis Bacon, Rene Descartes, and others, and we see that they are putting thought on a different foundation from that that had gone on earlier.
Well, what happened with the modernists, maybe if we tried to sum it up, is that Seemed to be this emerging consensus that the world was rationally intelligible.
Yes, and that human beings could explore both physically and mentally and also come to predict and control the Transformations of the material world.
I mean it seems to me that that's the fundamental element of let's say the scientific and therefore also the modernist perspective but but also I think that what went along with that was the idea that Progress or genuine progress in knowledge was possible and along with that the benefits of progress both conceptually and Technologically and I mean it seems to me to be it seems to me to be fair to point out that That movement
bore substantive fruit.
I mean yes argue about the misery that the modernist movement caused along the way and Say with regards to the advancement of military technology and so forth, but it seems indisputable to me that the average human being is far better off now than he or she was, well certainly 200 years ago and absolutely 500 years ago.
Right.
So this revolution in thought with the subsequent developments in science and technology, we certainly can judge philosophies by their fruits.
And so we can then say, yeah, absolutely.
We're living longer.
We're living healthier.
We're living a less pain-free life.
We're able to enjoy More art, more leisure, and so forth.
So all of the things that, and again, this is a value judgment, if you think those are all good things, then we're doing a whole lot better as a result of that philosophy.
Now, the other side, though, I want to emphasize here is that you emphasize the That the world is rationally intelligible, that along with modernism came the claim that it was rationally intelligible to each individual rather than there being an elect number of people who have special cognitive insights into the mysteries of the universe or that there are certain authoritative institutions that are controlled by elites and only they are the ones who have cognitive and
therefore social authority to make various pronouncements.
Part and parcel of the rise of modernism is a broadly universalizing of that, that each individual is born with a rational capacity, and that with proper training, education, literacy, and so forth, they can come to understand the world for themselves, they can be self-responsible, they can take charge of their lives, and as a result of that, we should have An extension of rights that used to be prerogatives only of the few.
An expansion of freedom.
You can do whatever you want with your life, broadly speaking.
And so what we then see is that it's not only a religious elite or a political elite, That is empowered, but rather every human being, and then we can see systematically over the course of the next century, it gets extended to not only males who own property, but to all males, and then to women, and then to people of other ethnicities and other races, as we push back against all of that.
So we have this notion of universal rights and universal self-responsibility, universal freedom, that I think also is part and parcel of the modern movement.
Well the thing about science that makes it so peculiar, I think, is that science is actually A technology that enables people who are bright, but not that bright, let's say, to genuinely produce advances in knowledge because of the method, right?
I mean, if you're a careful scientist, look, when we studied what predicted academic achievement, for example, both in graduate school and among faculty members, Creativity didn't even enter the equation That's interesting Conscientiousness,
but I think it's partly because with the scientific method you can you can actually break down your knowledge seeking into a set of implementable technological steps and that enables it to be implemented on an incredibly broad scale and even if a lot of it is error-ridden which is obviously the case and and to a scandalous degree to somewhat lately and It still means that as hundreds of thousands of us and increasingly now millions
of us grind away slowly at this careful technology of knowledge acquisition that overall we do seem to be able to predict and to control the world better.
And then that started to become questioned.
You know, one of the things that seemed to characterize postmodernism, one definition that I've read is skepticism of meta-narratives.
Right.
Sorry, that's from Jean-Francois Lyotard.
He is the one credited with labeling postmodernism philosophically so and defining it as a skepticism toward metanarratives.
What that means, there's a couple of things built into that.
One is, of course, the skepticism.
And philosophy for the last century and a half or so has entered an increasingly skeptical mode.
So that pushes back against the very broad claims that the early modernists are making, that the power of reason is great, it is highly competent, and that essentially we can figure out all of the important truths of the world.
We can come up with a big story that explains everything, ultimately.
Not necessarily that any one individual will contain all of that knowledge in his or her mind, but certainly, communally, we'll have a huge amount of knowledge.
We will slowly, as you're putting it together, piece together a big picture story about the way the world works.
And then in principle, there's nothing about the universe that we can't figure out.
There are just things that we haven't been able to figure out.
So the skepticism that Lyotard and the others are talking about is a skepticism about that grand set of claims, right?
A meta-narrative, a narrative that encompasses everything.
Instead we're left with smaller narratives and then as the movement develops we should be skeptical even about the truth status or the knowledge status of those smaller narratives.
So what What becomes important in the postmodern tradition is a skepticism about our ability to know the world in milder form as much as the modern thinkers thought we could and in stronger postmodern form at all.
That maybe there is no such thing as truth, no such thing as knowledge.
Instead all we have is opinions and beliefs that are subjectively held but don't have any objective...
Post-modernists that were influenced by Saussure, for example, they seem to be convinced in some strange way of something that disturbed me when I first really discovered dictionaries when I was a kid.
You know, I'd look up a word in the dictionary and of course it would just refer to another word in the dictionary and that would refer to another word in the dictionary and yes be in some sense any definition outside of the dictionary and the French intellectuals that were so Influential in the postmodern world seem to think of meaning in exactly that way they exactly understand that Linguistic meaning is necessarily embedded in a larger linguistic context so that each
word is dependent on each phrase and each phrase is dependent on each sentence and so there's a contextual dependency Absolutely on linguistic framing, but they seem to me to and and this is one of the major problems I think of postmodernism in university is that they seem to deny or ignore The existence of any world whatsoever outside of linguistic construction and that's that's something that
strikes me as Extraordinarily curious that that like it's a real denial of nature in my estimation, but also something tremendously dangerous because Well, assuming that you think that physics and biology and chemistry actually have any sort of genuine reality, it denies the existence of a substrate of existence that the purely linguistic relates to.
I mean, I always think of words as being They're not so much descriptions.
They're tools that you use to like it and that's a Wittgensteinian idea is that words are really tools that you use to operate on the world with and the consequences of those operations are actually manifest in the world of sensation and perception and emotion and motivation and embodiment rather than purely on a linguistic level and so I also don't really understand how it could be that Our intellectuals could come to the conclusion that our,
and this seems like a primarily French idea, that our ideas are primarily constructed linguistically.
I mean, How do animals exist under those circumstances?
Yeah.
Now, that strong form of linguistic skepticism that you're articulating is most pronounced in Jacques Derrida, and he does bill himself as a post-structuralist, and that's a linguistic version of postmodernism.
But the challenge here is that our view is that consciousness is a relational phenomenon.
It's responsive to an external world.
And that should be the fundamental realist commitment that we make.
The problem that the post-structuralists are coming up with by the time we get to Derrida, I should say, the idea that there isn't any sort of ontological substrate matching onto, not all of the post-modernists will buy into that as strongly as Derrida does.
They might say, well, there's something out there, but we just can't know what the relationship is between our concepts and our words and an external reality.
The point though is that the words that we use are abstractions and they do come along fairly far or high up in our cognitive development.
If you want to argue that consciousness is a response to reality or that consciousness is a relational phenomenon, as I do, to maintain that objective Relational commitment there what you then have to do is take up all of the skeptical Arguments that want to put consciousness out of relationship or to say that there's no way To bridge this gap between the subject and the object once you start going down that road If you want to say for example that perception is
fraught with illusions or hallucinations or that we can't tell the difference between A veridical perception when our sensory organs are in contact with reality and a hallucination, well then you have a gap between our conscious apparatus and reality.
If you then want to go on and argue, as empiricists do, that our concepts And the words that we assign to the concepts are based on empirical observations or perceptual observations, but you now believe that those perceptual observations are subjective and out of relation with objective reality Then you're going to say these abstract concepts and words are also out of relation with reality.
And then what gives them their meaning if you can't establish a connection between the words and reality?
Then you're into the dictionary.
You're saying, well, what gives the words their meaning?
Is there sideways or network connections to other words?
And then a generation or two later, you're into Derrida's University, where he says language is all of reality.
That's also where the postmodernists claim about the primacy of power seem to sneak in.
It's like, well, if the words are only related to one another in terms of their verbal relationship, well, they don't seem to have any motive force.
And as soon as you enter a landscape of linguistic consideration that has no motive force, then there's nothing to do.
And so this seems to me to account for Like I've been criticized very often for Let's say conflating post-modernism and Marxism But it seems to me that the Marxists or that the post-modernists have had the default to what are essentially Marxist preconceptions to add any motive to their thinking and What they've done is to say that while words are related to one another and that's how they derive their fundamental meaning And they're not really connected to the world in any real way
except in so far as they privilege Exactly.
So to go back to your dictionary analysis, the next step then would be to say if words are in these linguistic relationships to other words and we can find out what they are in dictionaries, well who writes the dictionaries?
And then, at that point, you're not asking an epistemological question anymore.
You're asking a social and psychological question.
So, who are the authors of the dictionary?
What authorizes, rather than, with the power to decide what words mean?
At that point, we step directly out of narrow epistemological arguments into social and psychological arguments about linguistic communities.
So, another...
Go ahead.
No, though, because well look if if the words only have meaning in relationship to one another and there's this gap between the words and Empirical reality which by the way, I don't think anybody disputes.
I mean, that's why we need five senses That's why we need to communicate with each other That's why we need the scientific method, right?
It's because it's difficult to establish a useful one-to-one relationship between words and reality.
But if words serve power, then it seems to me that what the postmodernists have done is taken biological motivation, let's call it the motivation for power at least, and sneaked it through the back door and and Reconnected the world of linguistic abstraction to the world of reality but Saying well look the only connection is one of power and then they leave
why it is that people want power like The idea that people want power first of all is complicated idea because you have to define power and you have to define want and And those aren't trivial issues by any stretch of the imagination.
And so you sneak it in the back door as sort of self-evident and then that seems to undermine the general postmodernist claim.
It's like if the words are only embedded in a network of meaning that's related to other words, then it isn't a fair move ontologically or epistemologically to reinsert power striving like a Nietzschean power striving or even an Adlerian power striving as the fundamental and what would you call it sort of sui generis
motivation that characterizes human beings so I also don't understand how they get away with that except that it seems to be like a mask for the continuation of a Marxist move under a new guise Well, I have no problem with seeing power as a positive.
Coming back just in a moment to all of the suspicions that you're announcing about inappropriate understandings of the relationship of power, I do think we should be able to say our cognitive capacities are a power that we have, and they are a tool, and the whole point of using that tool is to increase our power in the world to achieve our goals.
What the postmoderns are doing is undercutting the two things that make that understanding of power legitimate.
One is to say that when I am making a cognitive claim, I am successfully saying something about the world so that we can use the words knowledge and truth.
So if I want to act on the basis of my beliefs, that those beliefs do map onto world as it really is.
But if you are skeptical about any sort of a knowledge claim or any sort of a truth claim, then you're just going to say, no, no, your claims merely are subjective beliefs that are peculiar to you or peculiar to your group, and they don't have any special cognitive status whatsoever.
In that case, if you want to act on or use those beliefs to empower you, then you are in an out-of-reality connection.
The other thing is that we want to say that power should be a tool that we use for good, for advancing genuine values in the world.
But another part of the postmodern skepticism is to say that we cannot ground any values objectively.
Instead, values are merely subjective preferences, either individually or group-oriented.
And so in that case, if you have your value framework, then we're into the problem of relativism and I have my value framework.
Neither of us is able to adduce any facts that give an objective grounding to those values or to argue that those values should be universally embraced.
Then we're just left with, you have a certain amount of power to advance your interests, I have a certain amount of power to advance my interests, and it's a naked power struggle in the suspicious way that you're worried about.
And that is, we come back to this issue of how Marxist or not the postmoderns are, but you're right that at least the great-grandfather move was made by the Marxists in one generation and the Nietzscheans in the next generation.
To strip power down to that a moral Ontological status that you are worried about but but what's the motivation for it?
It's like if there isn't a reality that's outside the linguistic Well, I think there are two kinds of motivations.
One of the things we know is that there are people who just like power.
They want to control other people.
They have their agendas.
I know we can talk about the sociological and the psychological foundations of that, but that is an ongoing fact about society.
Some people just want power.
And they will then rationalize their use of power over other people by a variety of means.
Okay, so we're willing to accept that as an extra-linguistic reality.
Yes.
That's the thing that's so surprising to me.
It's like, I'm not just muting that.
That's obviously the case, but why now?
Right.
If you think of the way some lawyers argue in a courtroom, they will use all sorts of rhetorical power plays.
They will make fallacious arguments.
If they can get away with it, they will browbeat witnesses and make up facts and so forth.
Now, they are not really skeptical.
They believe that there's an external world and so forth.
They just believe that life is a power struggle and any tactic is fair in order to achieve their ends.
So they're not postmodernist lawyers.
They're just old-fashioned power-seeking lawyers and so forth.
Now that is one motivation.
It comes up in religious circles.
It comes up in political circles.
It comes up in the schoolyard and so on.
But the other one and the one that I think that we are worried about though is that those who get to that view about the amoral ontological substrate being power are those people who are smart and who Do some thinking about philosophy, thinking about politics, and so forth, and they argue themselves into that position because they find the power of those skeptical arguments to be convincing rationally to them.
So even though this is not a paradoxical formulation, even though they are rational individuals, they are following the logic of certain skeptical arguments to its conclusion, and the legitimate conclusion of those arguments is that a moral power rules the universe.
Okay, so so let's let's examine that for a moment.
I mean this is another thing that it strikes me as as Specious to say the least.
I mean first of all, I'm very skeptical of people who try to Reduce all complex phenomena to a single explanatory mechanism, you know, I mean if you look at and because I do look at things biologically and It's obvious that human beings have a multitude of primordial motivational systems and that we share them and that we share them with animals.
There's pain and there's fear and there's incentive reward and there's rage and there's play and there's hunger and there's Lust and that's a handful that there's more than that and these are very and you know those Motivations get integrated across time into Hyper motivations,
let's say that that would be something akin to an integrated narrative one that is Manifested interpersonally, but also played out socially and higher order values emerge from that um You take Acclaim like the postmodernists make that well first of all they accept the idea that there's almost nothing but hierarchy and that people's fundamental Motivations is to climb up the hierarchy even though they're very My experience has been for example whenever I talk about
hierarchy the postmodernist types go after me hammer and tongs Because I'm making the claim that hierarchy is a natural Phenomenon not necessarily a beneficial one but an inevitable one in some sense with with its pros and cons But they accept that uncritically when they presume that power is the fundamental drive and then the other Problem is and this is an even more serious one as far as I'm concerned is that the evidence that the
most effective way for human beings to occupy Positions of authority, let's say, and competence in human dominance hierarchies isn't through the naked expression of power.
That's actually unbelievably unstable.
You know, even Frans de Waal, when he was studying chimpanzees, you know, the female chimpanzees are more empathetic than the male chimpanzees.
But of all the chimpanzees, the alpha males are the most empathic.
They're the ones that engage in the most reciprocal interactions with the members of the troop.
And there's evidence accruing from all sorts of areas, including developmental psychology, the developmental psychology of Piaget, for example, that suggests that something like cooperative game-playing Aimed towards a particular important end is a much more stable means for establishing hierarchical relationships between people than power.
It's like power only rules in tyrannies.
And I guess maybe that's part of the reason that the postmodernists also insist that the Western hierarchy is fundamentally an oppressive patriarchy because that justifies their claim that power is the primary Motivator and mover of the world, but I just don't see how that's a tenable position.
Yeah Well, I think ontologically it's fair to say that most postmoderns buy into the notion that power is Fundamental there's not anything that can be reduced to that but then my reading of them is that that is not the entire philosophical story because power just is a a tool a means to an end and that still leaves open the question of What ends to which one is going to use that power?
And here, I think the postmoderns are rightly diverse in their views.
There is a strong streak of them, and this is something that goes back to Marxism in general, or broadly socialism in general, that will say...
Yes, we all want power, but we recognize that power is unequally distributed in the world, and that connects to your points about hierarchy.
But what is your value reaction to that unequal distribution of power in the world?
Now there are the Nietzscheans who will react to say, well, the unequal distribution of power is fine, and our sympathies are with those who have more power because we want them to advance the human species by some evolutionary mechanism.
But that is a subjective value preference that they are adding to previous facts.
That power is fundamental.
That power is unequally distributed.
Now we're adding, my sympathies are with those who have more power.
The socialist or more narrowly Marxist response to those to say...
Power is fundamental, power is unequally distributed, but our empathy is with those who are on the losing side of history, so to speak, or a various sorts of social forces.
And so what that then means for them is that they will accept that power is operating in a hierarchical context, But that they want to use whatever power they have to more equally redistribute the power in an egalitarian fashion.
So what we need to talk about is going to be though that third component about what your value reaction is to what you take to be the metaphysical substrate.
Okay, but then there's another form of real-world smuggling that goes along with that which is both ontological and ethical and the ontological smuggling would be well there are definitely power structures and that people compete for power so that's claim number one which seems to be extra linguistic and claim number two is that The proper moral stance of a human being is empathy.
So there's a claim that something like empathy exists and that empathy should be reserved for people who are on the lower end of the hierarchical distribution.
That's right.
Okay, and postmoderns like Foucault make that very clear.
Richard Rorty even more clearly makes that claim.
Jacques Derrida is a very interesting case because most of his work is not overtly social, ethical, or political, but at various points, particularly toward the end of his life, he says, you know, my entire sympathies are with We're good to go.
Personal, subjective preference that he has.
So he does appeal to a kind of Kantian regulative idea, or in more old-fashioned leather, it's a kind of platonic form that we need to appeal to if we're going to justify it in some way.
So it's kind of interesting that Recognizing exactly the problem that you're pointing out.
Where do we get that empathy claim from and justify that?
The postmoderns recognize the predicament and some of them are trying to point to extra linguistic sources for it.
Well that opens a big can of worms if your initial claim is that there's no such thing as an extra linguistic source.
Exactly, yes.
Because you let one extra linguistic source in, especially something as complicated as The interplay between, say, power, hierarchy, and empathy.
I mean, those are major motivational forces.
And then, if you're willing to admit to the existence of those major Motivational forces.
Well, it's hard to exclude pain.
It's hard to exclude anxiety.
It's hard to exclude something even more basic as hunger.
It's hard to exclude the proclivity for cooperation and play.
It's like all of biology, it seems to me, sneaks back into the postmodern project as soon as those initial linguistic realities are allowed.
Well, absolutely.
But that's what we're finding.
A lot of our debates are right now about psychology and biology, is that a certain number of psychologists and biologists are pushing back and saying, oh, there is a reality here.
We're getting great resistance from the postmodern second and third generation to having to do so.
Okay, so now you said the philosophers that have reviewed your book have been basically positive and so why are you receiving positive feedback from what is it about philosophy and about philosophers or about your work that's eliciting a positive response from them?
Yeah.
Well, my book is primarily an intellectual history.
To some extent, I am polemical and pushing back against postmodernism, so people understand that I'm taking a stance as well.
But the primary purpose of the book is to do a solid intellectual history.
Where does this confusing, sprawling, but nonetheless very vigorous and powerful movement come from?
And it doesn't come out of thin air, but rather there's a lot of deep thinking that's behind it.
So what I'm doing is I'm tracing what I see as the important intellectual movements of the last two centuries.
So I'm starting with Kant and Rousseau, but I'm talking about Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the others.
So all of those figures are difficult, complex, and important in their own right, and there is scholarly debate about, say, how skeptical or not Kant is, whether there's an element of liberalism or not in Nietzsche, Heidegger's connection to the Nazis, and so forth.
So there is a range of scholarly movement, and most of these major intellectuals have two or three major schools of interpretation attached to them.
And so the pushback that I am getting on Kant or on Nietzsche or Heidegger or whatever will be from those who are in a different school of interpretation with respect to them.
But typically among the philosopher, it's a respectful engagement because they will recognize that there is a very good argument that can be made for interpreting the philosopher the other way.
And typically then what I'm doing is emphasizing the skeptical elements or the ultimately negative and nihilistic elements that get sifted out and woven together into ultimately the postmodern framework.
And along the way the philosophers who want to argue, well, you know, this particular thinker is not that bad or he would not buy into the whole project.
Those are the ones who will criticize me on various things.
What I typically find, though, outside of philosophical circles, though, is, and this is not a criticism of these individuals, since we can't know everything, is that they will know something about Nietzsche or Heidegger or Kant, but they're not up on the scholarly literature.
They've read one book or one article about that person that was written from a certain perspective.
So if I make the argument for the other perspective on that thinker, it's new to them and it seems outrageous to them and so they will react negatively to it.
So something like that.
So now you wrote this book back in 2004, so you were a pretty early observer of the Vital importance, I suppose, of the postmodernist debate.
I mean, there's certainly been a rise in political correctness in the early 90s and that's disappeared by the mid 90s, but 2004 is I would say five or six or maybe even eight years previous to the to this new Burgeoning of political polarization and and the debate between the politically correct types Let's say and those who take a more biological perspective.
It's like what clued you into the fact that this was a Issue of fundamental of potentially fundamental importance Yeah.
Well, yeah, thanks.
I think it does a testament to the power of philosophy, the power of ideas, the power of logic, that when you identify abstract principles and their adoption, and you have a good sense of logic, you can make predictions about how they're going to play out when they are applied in real life.
This is one of my major career beliefs that philosophy is not disembodied, abstract, head in the clouds, but no matter how abstract and speculative various philosophical positions seem to be, When they are believed and acted upon, they make a real life difference.
So in part, that's what I was doing.
I actually wrote the first draft of the book 20 years ago this year in 1999.
I had a sabbatical and so I had an outline of the book written in 1999.
And then by the middle part of the year 2000 I had Fully written the book, but it didn't come out till 2004 because I had some challenges with getting getting it published But I think what has happened in the last five years or so is that We're now into second or third generation post-modernism depending on how you count things and what has happened is The first generation of postmoderns were very successful inside academic circles at educating
large numbers of students, getting a significant number of them through graduate school, and then to themselves becoming professors and public intellectuals.
And things reached a critical mass, I would say, starting six or seven years ago.
And so then we start to notice it significantly starting to transform the internal dynamics of the university, but we also now have a critical mass of activists who are now graduated.
Maybe they didn't graduate with PhDs, they got bachelor's degrees or master's degrees, but they've gone into activist organizations and they are trying to, and then successfully, shifting the terms of the debate Outside of the academic world, and so the broader public starts to notice things.
And then that's where we are right now with the culture war manifesting itself on two major fronts, the academic world and the broader cultural space.
Right.
Well, so what are your concerns about that?
Like when you look out at the world, You're obviously concerned enough about postmodernist thinking to devote a substantial proportion of your academic career to it, and then to put yourself on the line to some degree as well.
What is it about the postmodernist view that...
Well, let's ask this question two ways.
What do you think the advantages If any are to the postmodernist view or the inevitability of it, and what do you think the dangers and disadvantages are?
Well, that's two big questions.
First, why I'm worried about it.
And there's a question about what degree of worry one should have.
Interestingly, in my home discipline of philosophy, postmodernism is not that strong.
I think philosophy flirted with postmodernism for a while.
I think philosophy did generate all of the arguments, or at least all the major arguments that postmoderns use.
But philosophy does have, built into its DNA, so to speak, a very healthy respect for argumentation.
And a liking for new arguments.
So what has happened mostly in the philosophy profession is a serious development and engagement with all of these negative skeptical arguments and so on, but then a realization that a lot of them don't work in various ways, and then people moving off in other directions.
Or once we start seeing the same arguments being recycled and retreading, a certain amount of boredom occurs with it because smart, active-minded people like new things.
And so someone comes along with a new positive argument or a new positive program and philosophers get excited about that.
And so postmodernism is a little bit passe in those disciplines.
But I am worried about it because philosophy, demographically, is a tiny proportion of the overall academy, and the postmodern arguments have been picked up by the larger and more influential academic disciplines, such as psychology, right, you know this one as well, English literature, to some extent in the law schools, in the field of history, sociology is very polluted.
And then the big rise of all of the various special studies programs, you know, gender studies, race studies, ethnicity studies, and so on.
You find a much higher percentage of postmodernism there.
Now, I have not seen good journalistic sociology about higher academic, whether it's 8% or 40% of people who are postmodern or not.
But there clearly is an uptick, a statistically significant increase in the number of people who are adopting postmodern viewpoints and then educating the next generation of students.
Yes, well, among the activist types, Yeah, absolutely.
Yes, that's right.
So this is a non-philosophical issue.
This is a journalistic or a demographical issue about measuring to what extent it's a rising movement, how widespread it is, and so on.
And my concern professionally is with the arguments that generate postmodernism and refuting those.
Now, why this is important is, well, you know, I'm a professor, so I'm always dealing with young people who are at the early stages of their careers.
And in my view, the most important thing that we all need as human beings, we're thoughtful people, we want to be passionately engaged with the world, we want our lives to be meaningful, is we do need a philosophy of life that's going to set us up for The best chance of succeeding in our lives as possible.
So in my view, I'm basically an optimist.
We do need as young people with our whole lives ahead to have some sense that my life is going to be meaningful, it's going to be significant, that there are important values that I can strive for.
The romantic in me wants to say, my life can and should be this great adventure.
And having that fundamental commitment and helping students sort out what are the genuine values that are worth pursuing in life, that has to be instilled in young people, otherwise they will just drift through life and then they will get to their older years and realize that their life has frittered away.
Yes, okay, so that's an interesting now that's very interesting observation because you know I've been trying to account at least in part for well, let's say the Surprising and surreal popularity of my public lectures and Absolutely,
yes about 150 cities now to about 300,000 people and you know, I lay out a fairly straightforward case I would say that's very much analogous to the case that you just described and that is that Well,
we look for some unassailable truths and for me There are two unassailable pessimistic truths and one is that Substantial proportion of life is going to be suffering because we're finite and even if things are going well for you now You're subject to illness mental and physical you're subject to the decimation of your dreams You're going to lose the people that you love the world that you know is going to change in ways that you find Disconcerting
and unfortunate.
And so, suffering's built in.
If you don't mind me interrupting at that point, the phrase unassailable truth, what we should be doing, though, in education is...
Saying that there are no unassailable truths, that part of a good education is any previous generation's truth should be assailed, at least intellectually, by the students.
They should challenge, question, and look at those truths, what the best arguments can be mounted against them, and then make their own judgments about whether they agree that this truth is, in fact, a truth, or whether it needs to be rejected and moved on.
So the great danger I think of postmodernism though is its skeptical stance toward the idea of there being truth at all and then in its activist manifestation when the professors are functioning as I just have my subjective preferences and I have power in the classroom and my My practice as a professor is simply to indoctrinate students in my subjective preferences.
In that case, what you are doing is not only giving students a very cynical, negative, ultimately empty view of the world, but you are not at all training them in the ability to think for themselves, to compare competing viewpoints and make their own judgment.
So that's the danger.
Right, right.
Well, I guess I should I should reconsider my use of the word unassailable.
I was thinking more, I suppose, clinically in some sense.
My experience has been that you don't have to scratch very deeply beneath the surface of people's lives until you find the sorrows that they're dealing with.
I know you're not saying this, but from the student's perspective, it can't be that Professor Peterson, with all of his years of experience and wisdom, has announced that this is a truth, therefore it's a truth.
They have to go through the process that you went through.
Hopefully you can accelerate that process for them, but they have to go through that process.
Yeah, well and I mean I do that in the lectures by telling stories too and illustrating the fact that you know that the limitations that are placed on us that produce suffering and I invite people I would say to draw their own conclusions about how they regard that reality in their own lives and The second proposition let's say is that the suffering is often made worse by malevolence and that can be well
the sort of What would you say impersonal malevolence of nature or the more personal malevolence of society or the individual and so we're faced with that set of problems that that vulnerability that's characteristic of existence and then that That vulnerability because it constitutes a real set of problems calls to us to generate solutions and it's in that Attempt to generate solutions that that adventure that
you described earlier seems to me to manifest itself and so it seems reasonable to me to To suggest to young people that they do have a destiny that gives their life significant individual import and that is to take arms up against the Inequities of existence at whatever levels they can and to act forthrightly and courageously to minimize Unnecessary suffering
and to constrain malevolence and that and that it's also it is also actually a vital importance that they do that because their their failure to do so is more damaging than their than they think their nihilism and cynicism that might entice them into Nihilistic and destructive acts themselves actively is more destructive than they think and their capacity
to do positive things in the world on a large scale individually and in their family and in their community is much larger than they think and I it's very difficult for me to see how Young people can be left uninformed of that as at least a potential reality without falling down the rabbit hole of nihilism and cynicism and subjectivism and relativism
that seems to me to be at least one of the primary dangers of postmodernism.
Yes.
Yeah, I think 100% on the latter part of what you were saying, I think it should be an open question initially.
Yes, there is suffering in the world.
Yes, there is malevolence in the world.
But we should also be open to the fact that there is pleasure in There is beauty.
There is romance.
There is adventure.
There is genuine love in the world.
And what proportions of benevolence versus malevolence, happiness versus suffering, is possible and natural to human beings?
That should be part of the conversation early on.
I think it's an appropriate initial...
Go ahead.
...of your tools.
I'm sorry?
That's a conversation about the potency of your tools.
Like, you could admit that these fundamental limitations exist, but you don't have to draw the conclusion that they're constraining in any final manner.
Well, it's not just about the tools, it's also about the nature of reality that we are confronting.
There are, of course, people who are Pollyannists who have this view that the world is on our side, there's a benevolent God or the forces of the universe are lined up such that I lead a charmed life and everything will go well for me.
There are people at the other end of the spectrum who argue the opposite.
The fates are against me, the gods hate me no matter what I do.
The forces that govern the universe will just grind me down.
That's got nothing to do with my tool set, initially, so to speak.
That's a metaphysical claim about the nature of the universe.
Now, when we do turn to the tool set, whatever your position is along the spectrum of benevolence to malevolence, there is the question about how much power I have To craft my own tools to forge myself into the kind of being that can take on life's challenges.
And here I think postmodernism is dangerous in two important respects.
In my view, the most important development of education, schooling, parenting, and so on, is Giving students and young people the critical thinking, the rational power to be able to understand the world, to be able to conceptualize it, to know how to do the experiments, to analyze the results, to sort out good truth claims from bullshit, and so on.
And so all of that cognitive development that can only come from a commitment to the idea that the evidence matters, That doing the experiments matters, that being excruciatingly honest with respect to the power of the arguments for and against positions that one might want to argue or adopt, that that's absolutely important.
The development of a student's rational, logical, critical capacity is fundamentally important, and postmodernism is an assault on that.
What that means is that in practice, students do not develop that most important life skill.
Put them out into the world without the tools that they need.
And I think they are then more likely to feel disempowered, they're more likely to feel overwhelmed, and then we get the angry, despairing activist type of person that we see in larger numbers now.
Okay, so if the postmodernists are concerned ethically with the re-establishment of genuine power At the bottom of the power hierarchies.
Why do you think it's the case, if it is the case, and many commentators have made this case, Jonathan Haidt among them, that the doctrines that the postmodernists tend to be teaching young people seem to be so absolutely infantilizing and undermining rather than strengthening and Increasing resilience.
I mean, is it that they're not interested at the individual level?
I mean because it seems so paradoxical that these things are happening simultaneously and Yeah, a couple things on that.
One is that in addition to developing a person's rational capacity, we do need to develop their emotional capacity.
Life is a capacity for a great adventure, for great positivity, but as you emphasize, there is also going to be a significant amount of pain and suffering.
And so what we need to do is develop our emotional capacity for handling all of that.
Resilience is an important part of that.
One unfortunate part of the postmodern package, though, is that they are focusing on a very narrow range of emotions, typically negative emotions, and they don't see those emotions as having any connection to rationality or any connection to a response to an actual objective reality out there.
So The emotional life of human beings is both cramped and a mystery if you take the postmodern framework seriously.
And so I think what happens then is when those postmoderns become teachers or professors or in a position of authority, It's a large amount of emotional communication that is going on, but it's going to be a negative, rage-focused, despair-focused, cynical, jaded-focused kind of emotionalism.
And to the extent that students pick up on that, they're going to be turned off or If they have some predisposition toward that, they just get sucked into that emotional universe.
Speak to Jonathan Haidt's point that you're raising.
Let me just say, one thing that is striking to me is I find it interesting among our public intellectuals that three of the most prominent people in the public intellectual sphere are yourself.
Jonathan Haidt and Steven Pinker and all three of you are professionally psychologists.
I don't think that that is accidental because what all three of you are doing in different ways is Noticing that philosophy of course is a very abstract set of arguments and principles, but all of those do need to be operationalized in Actual living breathing human beings and when you see how they are actually operationalized in human beings a large part of what you're doing is psychology So I think it's not
accidental that psychologists are of significant importance in the public intellectual space right now.
So to speak to Jonathan Haidt's point, I think what he is pointing out is that we are now into a second and third generation of postmoderns and there's a devolution in the intellectual quality of the movement and that makes sense because if your first-generation movement is quite skeptical and relativistic,
but nonetheless very educated as Rourke, Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard especially in my view were, but the end conclusion of their position is that we don't need to take rationality,
logic, the quest for objectivity too seriously What will happen in the next generation then will be a whole generation of people with PhDs who don't take logic, rationality, and the quest for objectivity very seriously.
Instead they will be not developing those Skill sets at a very high level.
So there will be a devolution.
They will be more emphasizing emotionalism.
They will be more emphasizing activism.
And then in the third generation, it will be a further devolution.
So I don't have a huge...
Where is that going?
Like, is that a self-defeating...
I think it is self-defeating intellectually, and one of the things that people who are intellectuals who have been following the arguments for a while notice is, this is just a recycling of arguments that I heard five years ago, ten years ago, twenty years ago, and so it becomes self-defeating in the sense that it fails to attract the ongoing interest of the smart, very active-minded people.
I think also that this is something built into human nature, and this is my great optimism.
With young people, when they come to university, however underprepared and damaged they might be by their primary and high school education, they are nonetheless, particularly I think in North America still, optimistic, gung-ho.
They believe that they can make something of their lives, and when they start going into classes, Where the professors in word and action and just in their physical bearing are communicating rather messages of defeatism and cynicism.
Students who are psychologically healthy will just avoid those classes.
They will go into fields that hold some promise of positivity for them.
They will be going to entrepreneurial fields.
I'm sorry?
That they may avoid university altogether.
Yeah, absolutely.
Sure.
Yeah.
So what's the point of going to wallowing about what a victim you are or what a bad person you are because you have white skin or you're a male or whatever for four years.
I'm going to quit university and get on with living.
I do think there also will be corrective mechanisms in place.
To some extent, universities are driven by dollars, and who is writing the big checks?
If it's million-dollar donors, when some terrible manifestation of political correctness happens at their institution, they won't write the million-dollar check the next year.
That will get noticed, and that will be communicated in various ways.
You know, the universities have their problems, but I am ultimately optimistic that they will be able to heal themselves.
There are market mechanisms in place to bracket.
So what kind of time span?
Okay, that's interesting.
I mean, I waver between optimism and pessimism because I feel that the strata of postmodernists is relatively young and relatively entrenched and protected by tenure and of course I think tenure is a good idea.
And that they're also unbelievably good at fomenting activism.
I mean, I think political surveys indicate that only about 4% of the general population hold views that might be regarded as radical Marxist slash postmodern.
It's a tiny minority, like it's bigger than that in universities, but they swing a They swing beyond their weight.
Absolutely.
They hit past their weight.
And it's also, I think, because, you know, serious academics, this is my impression, is that serious academics really ignored the second-rate postmodern discipline for decades, feeling that the arguments that they were making were weak enough so that they didn't even require A strong rebuttal.
I mean even when Steven Pinker wrote his book The Blank Slate, you know, I read that book and I thought That it was an interesting book, but I thought Jesus Dr.
Pinker No one's believed that people are blank slates for like 30 years.
That's so great that it seems, as a biological psychologist, it just seemed to me to be observed that that case had to be even made.
But he was obviously right about that, and I was obviously very wrong about that.
Yeah.
Predictions are hard to make.
I think it goes back to we need better journalism about the demographics of higher education and what's going on there.
So is it 4%, is it 12%, is it 25%?
Then this issue you're raising about punching above their weight, that does seem to be true, but how much above their weight are they punching?
Is the major problem in the classrooms, or is it a matter of, as we know, most academics don't like committee work, but a significant number of, so if the first rate people are doing their real academic work and they're trying to avoid committee work, But the second and third graders, they don't mind committee work, and they see it as a vehicle to power within the university for them.
So if the postmoderns are, as we like to think, second or third grade, that's a little bit unfair.
Not all of them are.
But a higher percentage of them doing the important committee work, then they have a certain amount of power there.
An overlooked part of the university demographics, from my perspective, is student life.
Where the residents, the people who look after the residence hall and the entertainment and deciding what student clubs are authorized or not.
There's been a significant infiltration of postmodernism in that area.
That's not on the academic side or only in indirect.
If you look at orientation programs, and again, we need better journalism here, but you find a significant number of them are devoting the whole orientation week when the first-year students are coming in to lectures on privilege and oppression and whatever the buzzwords are.
That also is an important issue as well.
There was an article written in the Chronicle of Higher Education excoriating faculties of education.
For producing precisely the kinds of internal university activists that are pushing exactly that kind of agenda.
Right.
Yeah, faculties of education.
I do some work in philosophy of education.
They are all over the map, but there has been a significant postmodern shift with postmodernism being the reigning philosophy of education.
And then, of course, that has impact not just in higher education because that's training.
The next generation of teachers.
One of my younger colleagues, a man named Andrew Colgan, recent PhD from Western, University of Western Ontario, in his dissertation was documenting the significant demographic shift among Ontario high school teachers toward basically buying into a postmodern framework.
And that's going to be a very important generational shift for Ontario.
So what makes you like you talked about market forces and the corrective ability and And we spoke before we started this podcast about About speaking about optimistic and positive Elements my movements mean So well,
I have two questions for you at least before we conclude and one is You seem optimistic and positive and and so What do you see as the route out of this and and what what will replace it and like what's the time span?
Yes.
Well, I think one thing that we are noticing is an increasing number of first-rate people who are now engaging the debate within higher education.
So you can mention someone like Steven Pinker, who's not just doing academic psychology now.
Instead, he's devoting resources to defending in a public intellectual sphere the Enlightenment project.
Jonathan Haidt, also an excellent psychologist, doing clinical work as well, but nonetheless is formative in creating the Heterodox Academy, bringing together academics from a wide variety of political spectrum positions, but nonetheless all agreeing that academic freedom, free speech, and so forth are important.
The work that you're doing, stepping out onto the public stage as well.
So there is a major uptick in very good academics taking postmodernism and its offshoots seriously and pushing back, and I think that augurs well.
I think there also is a financial clout.
I think young students, when they come in, they do take a postmodernism course, but they don't go back for more.
Or they plug into the student grapevine and they learn which courses to avoid.
And in many cases, the postmodern activist type professors, they are really ghettoized in marginal departments.
They might be outsized in their voice, but they're not attracting a huge number of students.
And in my view, the students that they are attracting are ones who are already predisposed to that.
They're not necessarily converting...
Well, it seems to me the least invasive way of dealing with postmodernism, if it does have the negative attributes that we've been discussing, is actually something like a market solution, which is to Inform young people as to its essential and to help convince them that there are viable alternatives,
like viable philosophical alternatives, viable political alternatives, courses they could be taking that would enrich their lives instead of enhancing their sense of victimization.
Exactly, that's right.
It seems like the safest route rather than political intervention or Or some kind of attempt to radically change the structure of the universities, which seems to me more dangerous than useful.
And I'm very gung-ho on the internet.
The internet, of course, is just a tool.
It can be used for good or ill, and there's a lot of crap, as we all know, on the internet.
But it also is the case that young, open-minded, hungry students, when they are at a university and they're not getting the education that they want, they now have access to all sorts of viewpoints, and they are actively exploring them.
And I'm sure you get hundreds of contacts.
I get lots of contacts from students from all over the world who come to me through the internet, and I know that that's a worldwide phenomenon.
I also do think that there's lots of very interesting entrepreneurial experimentation going on in higher education.
Some of it's driven by the cost demographics.
You know, people asking the reasonable question, you know, is it really worth a quarter million dollars?
To get a good higher education at a traditional bricks and mortar university?
Or should I spend just $100,000 and maybe get only a 75% quality education at an online institution or some other vehicle?
So there's lots of experimentations that are going on there.
And of course the technology is just getting better and better.
Instead of the only avenue being taking the universities on head-on from the inside, that battle has to be fought, and some of us are doing it, but there will be a significant number of people who will just avoid the universities altogether, and there will be new institutions that are created, and that will be a market solution.
Do you know that about 75% of the cumulative student debt in the United States is held by women?
I did not know that.
And the disproportionate number of those women are black.
So it turns out that it's so perverse, they're so perverse, and part of the explanation for that, it's not the total explanation, is that these women were Enticed or chose to enter disciplines where the probability of making enough money over a Reasonable span of your life,
especially given the high interest rates that are associated with student debt is extraordinarily low.
So that's another strange Reaction as a perverse unintended consequence.
I was not aware of that statistic.
I was aware that This matches with my experience that about 60% of our university graduates are women Compared to only about 40% male so there's a demographic shift there so But I was not aware of the the racial component of that unintended consequence.
It's really you know because these poor women are laboring under these debt loads that are It looks like they're never going to be able to clear.
Okay, so that's that's optimism.
It's long-term optimism, but it's awesome.
And so that's good to hear.
Can I ask you a little bit about what your private What your life has been like, let's say, over the last couple of years, as you've used social media more and as your work has become much more disseminated and discussed publicly.
The pluses and the minuses for you and what's changed for you.
Overall, pluses outweigh the minuses, definitely.
The main minus has been that it's cut a lot into my writing time.
In some ways, majorly, I'm a stereotypical nerd.
My ideal day is to go to the library with my computer and read and write with a stack of books.
And I envision my professor's life as being dominated by that.
But certainly for the last couple of years, my writing and thinking time has been lessened.
The other major negative just has been...
It's just the crap you have to put up with people who are on various hobby horses who disagree with you but who don't have social skills or to know how to have a fruitful discussion.
So they send you ad hominem emails and just resort to insults because you disagree with them.
So there's been a certain steady stream of that, but part of my learning curve has been just to be able to ignore that or filter that out and focus on the The positive responses and the critical responses that are raising good questions.
I did want to mention, if I can plug, I have an open college podcast series and I've got two podcasts in the work where I'm taking up the serious and in some cases good criticisms that have been raised of my work.
So I'm working on those as well.
And that's just part of the ongoing fun scholarly back and forth that should be going on.
And while I am down on postmodernism, I should say that I do think it's an important part of any person's education.
To at least for some time consider the most skeptical and nihilistic arguments that are out there.
That postmodernism should have a seat at the table in any person's education.
And so it really should be a three or four way debate that's going on there.
And students need to process those arguments for themselves.
The other pluses are that I do enjoy travel, so in addition to my normal academic conferencing and academic lectures, I've been giving some public intellectual lectures and interacting with the general thinking public, and that's been a lot of fun.
It's actually been very encouraging to realize How many smart, knowledgeable people there are out there in the world living full lives, doing very interesting things, but they also have an interest in intellectual matters and you can have a very fond conversation with them about Nietzsche or Marx or the current state of higher education.
So I found that the tourism part that comes with the travel and just interacting with people that I never would have interacted to be very pleasurable.
The other big plus has been, since I am a professor, I just love young students in their first, second year of university when they realize how big the intellectual world is and how exciting it can be when they come alive intellectually.
And then having a lot more students from around the world who will email me or Facebook me with very interesting questions or they have their own podcast and when I can, I'll have a 45 or 50-minute conversation with them on their podcast.
So just interacting with a lot more students from other parts of the world than I otherwise would have.
So overall, the pluses have been great.
The thing is about the public exposure and the social media exposure that's so interesting is that the people who come to listen to you only come because they want to listen to you.
It's really pure.
It's a real pure form of the university, you know, because there's no compulsion as there is with Say mandatory classes and grades and so on in universities is that there is this tremendous public hunger for philosophical discourse that's really been completely, in some sense, undiscovered up until now and it's massive.
That's right and that's why I think optimistically I am or ultimately I am optimistic because I think it is built into human nature to want to be vigorous to engage with the world and since we're such a smart species to engage with the world intellectually so young people in their teens when they are becoming More fully aware of themselves as independent of their parents and that their whole life is ahead and they're preparing for life.
They do have this hunger and It's beautiful to see it activated Yeah, well obviously all the controversy that surrounded your work hasn't Soured you in the least on the intellectual enterprise.
It sounds like quite the contrary.
Well, what are you working on now?
I know you're having a hard time writing, but in the next five years, let's say, you've got ambitions.
I've carved out in my schedule, starting the end of this academic year, mid-May, a significant amount more of writing time.
And so I'm making progress and I'm optimistic that by the end of this calendar year, I'll be almost done this next book.
What I'm doing is focusing on the positive.
The postmodernism book is negative.
The Nietzsche and the Nazis book is negative, going into some dark philosophical and political territory.
But to put it positively, what are the positive philosophical issues and positions that need to be developed to reinvigorate the Enlightenment, to correct its deficiencies, to make people realize that the postmodern arguments are powerful, but they're powerfully based on some often easy philosophical issues or mistakes to make.
Very subtle.
So my value added is as a philosopher.
The way I'm going to in part package this is to say that we do have huge debates along any number of dimensions about politics and so on.
But in fact, most of our debates about politics are not at all about politics.
They are about underlying philosophical issues.
So for example, we're having debates right now about The proper political status of, say, transgender individuals.
But we're spending very little time actually talking about the politics of it.
Instead, we are having arguments about human nature and to what extent things are fixed causally and to what extent things are a matter of human volition, what things are subjective, what things are objective, and so on.
And so, really, we are having philosophical arguments, hopefully philosophical arguments, that should be informed by biology.
But even that is itself a philosophical debate because some people want to say we should approach this as a scientific method type of question, look at the facts, look at the experiments, and others have a more free-floating ideological commitment, that is to say, they're operating on a different epistemology.
So really what we're doing is we're having debates about epistemology and human nature, not really debates about politics.
The politics is just a manifestation of that.
So then my hopeful professional value added is to bring clarity and some fresh perspectives on those philosophical debates.
One of the things that has plagued philosophy is a whole number of false alternatives that have been entrenched in the discipline for generations.
And in many cases, if you can notice two apparently opposed arguments but realize they have a shared premise, and in often cases that shared premise is implicit, then asking what the alternatives to that implicit premise would be once you make it explicit can be very illuminating.
So I'm working that territory a lot.
Well, it's interesting, you know, that maybe one of the consequences is that out of the, let's call it, rather murky darkness of moral relativism and postmodernism and the claim that power is the fundamental motivation of human beings.
I mean, these are very pessimistic philosophical statements of Taken almost to almost you would think to their logical extreme Maybe what will happen is that out of that will come something like a philosophy that's genuinely optimistic without being naive Exactly, that's nicely put.
I'm reminded of a line from the Roman poet Horace, who was reflecting on some of the skeptical and nihilistic trends of his time, where they were denying the natural world, denying and so forth.
The line is, though you drive nature out with a pitchfork, ever she will return.
Right.
So the optimistic return is what we're working on now.
Well, and there does seem to be I would say a tremendous hunger for that, you know, one of the things I'm struck by and I'm sure you see this in your teaching is that It it's amazing You know, I I usually begin my lectures on a fairly pessimistic note,
you know detailing out the problems of human nature and society and to some degree the natural world trying to make a vicious case for the for the In some sense the atrocity of life and It means that there's nothing hidden in some sense when the argument begins and then I try to make a case that despite that You know we have within us the capacity to transcend that and then that capacity
to transcend that the atrocity of life is actually more powerful and then You can derive an optimism out of the pessimism, out of the pessimism that's even more optimistic because of the depth of the pessimism.
You know, like, and you can tell students, look, you guys, you've got real problems to deal with.
It's no wonder that you're suffering from the existential dilemmas that you're suffering from.
They're real.
But that doesn't mean that there isn't set of viable solutions and maybe a very large set of viable solutions that can be that you can learn and that you can practice and you can engage in that make a genuine difference to your life and a genuine difference to the life of the people around you and that this is even more real than the reality of the relativism and the nihilism and the pessimism and I've been aligning that especially with
the idea of responsibility, you know that It's possible to find the sustaining meaning in your life through the adoption of as substantive a responsibility as you can manage.
And it's really quite remarkable how ready people are for that idea.
It reduces the audiences to silence, to speak of that.
Yeah, well that's all of that touching on the profound themes that human beings do need to engage with.
My approach is typically different, particularly with my first-year students, where Reading of them is a lot of them are coming into university feeling somewhat constrained.
Sometimes they're in university because they have to be in university or they have the sense that their lives are largely predetermined or that things have been mapped out either by their parents or expectation of certain social forces or whatever and Getting them to see that the world is a lot more open There are a lot more possibilities and that they have more power to shape their own destinies than they otherwise might have
been taught.
So higher education is transformative in the sense of liberating them from constraints that they felt themselves to be put in.
And I found that that has been useful in tapping into the hunger that we were both talking about, because that can be suppressed.
But once they get a taste of it, that in fact they are free agents, that the world is a lot more open-ended than other people might have been telling them, they start to drink it up.
Well, that was the great thing about university for me.
You know, I mean, I came from a small town and I went to increasingly large universities and every time I made a transition, the sense that the world was opening up to me continued to increase.
It was unbelievable and liberating.
That's right.
It makes postmodernism unsettling because it really is a cramped intellectual vision, but it also tends to put people into smaller and smaller categories.
You're only a member of this group and you're an exemplar of it.
And your identity has been shaped by forces beyond your control and you can't engage with other cultures and other individuals except on the basis of hostility, which just means people retrench.
So it's a very closing in kind of intellectual movement.
So the optimism and the romance and the adventure in the sense that You can, in fact, take charge of your own life and make yourself and the world a better place.
That's the point that we need to emphasize.
But, of course, it can't be a naive one, so we do need better intellectual tools for that.
Well, I do think students, too.
One of the reasons I've always loved teaching undergraduates is because even those who have that brittle and Let's say thin-skinned cynicism sort of the prematurely intellectually hopeless have that this dynamism of youth that wants exactly that call to adventure exists and that
they will respond with unbelievable enthusiasm I agree entirely.
That's right.
Yeah to any message that puts That idea across in a believable manner and that takes them seriously like the other thing that struck me too that it's really saddening You know, I've talked to hundreds of people after my lectures now and It's it's almost Inconceivable The degree to which people are starving for encouragement How little they get and how little it takes to
make a massive difference in their life just to say, you know, you are a sovereign individual of divine value the You're the cornerstone of the community and and and that's the fundamental Presupposition of our society that happens to be true and that you can put your life together with truth and courage and things will work out better and even more importantly than that whether it works out or not even more importantly than that That is the
adventure and destiny of your life and it actually matters and people are so Dying they're dying for that idea Yeah, that's beautifully put.
So thanks for saying that.
Well look, I'd like to know when you put up those podcasts that respond to the criticisms of your book.
So if you would be kind enough to let me know that I'll be happy to do so.
Absolutely.
I would love to publicize them.
It might be an opportunity again for us to have another conversation.
Because I'm very interested in the criticisms, you know, because I relied on your book a fair bit in my discussion of postmodernism.
It's not an area of expertise of mine, you know.
I was one of those academics who tended to ignore it, not entirely, but while I was pursuing my own studies.
But your book was extremely useful and, you know, it's not necessarily the case that, because I'm not as philosophically versed as I might be, that I can Evaluate all the criticisms and so I would definitely like to know more about that and to know more about your response So please do let me know.
I really appreciate you taking the time to talk to me again.
I always find it extremely illuminating Great.
I appreciate the the invitation and spending time with you as well.
It's good fun Great great and important.
Good luck.
Good luck with your ambitions and I wish you Even more success in the public domain because I think that what you're doing is extremely helpful.
Well, thank you.
You too.
The regard is mutual, absolutely.
All right.
Well, and hopefully we'll have a chance to meet at some point in the not-too-distant future.
Perfect.
Very good to see you.
You too.
All right.
Bye for now.
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