Oct. 18, 2017 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
26:59
3863 College Is Not A Daycare | Everett Piper and Stefan Molyneux
With the rise of postmodernism across the intellectual landscape and the ongoing propaganda ongoing in many western universities, the objective nature of truth is under attack by the most depraved aspects of modern society. Dr. Everett Piper joins Stefan Molyneux to discuss the importance of objective ethics, the infection of postmodernism on college campuses, the rise of ad hominem attacks and the erosion of the foundations which built western civilization. Dr. Everett Piper is the President of Oklahoma Wesleyan University and the author of “Why I Am A Liberal and Other Conservative Ideas” and “Not a Day Care: The Devastating Consequences of Abandoning Truth.”Not a Day Care: http://www.fdrurl.com/not-a-daycareWhy I Am A Liberal: http://www.fdrurl.com/why-I-am-a-liberalTwitter: http://www.twitter.com/dreverettpiperYour support is essential to Freedomain Radio, which is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by making a one time donation or signing up for a monthly recurring donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
Hi everybody, this is Stefan Molyneux from Freedomain Radio.
We are very happy to have Dr.
Everett Piper, also known as the Pied Piper of Rationalities, the president of Oklahoma Westland University, the author of a very popular article, who I guess the title is somewhat self-explanatory, This Is Not a Daycare, It's a University, and the book Why I Am a, quote, Liberal and Other Conservative Ideas.
Dr. Piper, thank you so much for taking the time today.
It's my pleasure to join you all.
I appreciate being asked to come on your program and I think it'll be fun.
Well, so before we dive into some of these squalid relativistic mess of the modern academic environment in so many places, I wonder if you could help people to understand some of your evolution towards Terms like moral absolutism, which these days seems to mean fascism of some kind, conscience, which when I was growing up was a very big word and seems to have fallen by the wayside quite considerably.
What was your evolution towards this kind of critical thinking, moral absolutism, and I guess objective rationality?
Well, I'm going to put this interview into context.
I am a Christian and I believe that the words of Christ, you shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free, means something.
And if you go back to the founding of the Liberal Arts Academy, let's just go back some 1,000 years ago to the founding of Oxford.
The Liberal Arts Academy was established to do what?
To liberate culture, to liberate humanity, to educate a free man and a free woman, recognizing that those words that are emblazoned across the header of so many libraries across the Western world, you shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free, were the only context, those words were the only context for true and lasting and meaningful human freedom.
So the Liberal Arts Institution was established To liberate you and to liberate me, to educate a free man and a free woman.
And classical liberalism was that pursuit of liberty that was grounded in those time-tested truths, to use the Declaration of Independence language, those self-evident truths that are endowed to us by our Creator.
I would argue that when we lose those big laws of God, to quote G.K. Chesterton, we don't get liberty, but we rather get thousands and thousands of little laws that rush in to fill the vacuum, and thus we lose our liberty and lose our freedom at the altar of licentiousness when we forget that there's a measuring rod outside of those things being measured, quoting another Brit, C.S. Lewis, or you can do no measuring.
Thus, The pursuit of truth, not the construction of opinions.
Well, and as you point out in your book, you cannot consider yourself educated if all you have are opinions and this sort of postmodern relativistic mindset that everything is subjective and you find your own meaning and so on.
Why on earth would there be such a thing as academia?
If it was merely the studying of opinions, I mean, you can get that just by going to a bar and listening to people.
And this contradiction between the original goal of academia, which was to free us from error, and the modern academia, which seems to argue there is no such thing as error, it seems kind of contradictory.
I can't quite understand how people square that circle.
And the key word in your sentence there is contradiction.
There is no such thing as error.
However, when those people claim that there is no such thing as error, if I disagree with them, they will say I'm in error.
Therefore, it's self-refuting.
It's like saying I can't tolerate your intolerance or I hate those hateful people or I'm I'm sure that nothing is sure or I know that nothing can be known or I'm absolutely confident there are no absolutes.
These things are self-refuting.
They're duplicitous. They make no sense.
It's the literal definition of nonsense to make these postmodern claims of relativism.
Because you are sawing off the very branch upon which you're sitting while you try to make that argument.
And the irony for me in the academic world is these people don't even recognize it's as if they're a dog chasing their tail.
This makes no sense.
Oh, the number of times I've had to refute the self-contradictory statement, it is absolutely true that there is no such thing as absolute truth.
I mean, I don't even know how people tie their shoes or get out of bed facing the right way in the morning if they think that makes some kind of sense.
One other thing that you said, the issue of opinions.
I've said many times at Oklahoma Wesleyan University, I am not going to pat you on the back when you graduate and walk across the podium toward me as I shake your hand and hand you a diploma.
I'm not going to pat you on the back and whisper in your ear, congratulations, you now have a degree in opinions.
That would be absurd.
I hope you learned something while you're here.
I hope you know more about the truths that are relative to your discipline than having a mere opinion.
For example, if you majored in aerospace engineering and you're going to design airplanes on the basis of your opinion rather than the facts and the science of aerospace dynamics and engineering, I would like to know which airplane it is that you designed because the thing won't fly.
You're not going to get it and I don't want to get in it.
If you're going to administer medication on the basis of your opinion, I want to know where you work and I want to stay away from you because as a nurse, administering medication on the basis of opinion is going to be dangerous.
You're going to hurt people. Here's the thing.
Opinions always lead to bondage and slavery.
Truth sets us free.
Pol Pot and Mao and Robespierre and Chavez and Hitler and Castro and Mussolini and all the despots of history And the old argument, and this goes all the way back to Socrates, that reason equals virtue equals happiness.
That's, I mean, that's Nietzsche's phrasing, but I think it's not a bad way of talking about it.
Reason equals virtue equals happiness.
Well, You can also, of course, look at it the other way.
People who are generally unhappy, I would argue, are generally not living virtuous lives.
They're not following a rational consciousness, or they have moral beliefs that are both claimed to be universal, but also radically subjectivist at the same time.
And so when people are unhappy, it's usually because they're not virtuous, which means that they're irrational or anti-rational.
And it seems to me that the evidence for this shows up all over the place in society.
The people are generally on a lot of medications to try and make them happier.
As we've become wealthier as a society, people have become more unhappy.
We have massive national debt because we've substituted bribery for the convincing of others to become virtuous.
We've got terrible foreign wars and so on.
And quality of education is declining.
Sorry for the long speech, but basically, my argument would be that when society is going awry, we really need to look at its foundational beliefs, and we are not free to make better decisions as long as we continue to absorb endless error.
Richard Weaver wrote a seminal work in 1948.
The title of the book was called Ideas have consequences.
And what was the point of Weaver's seminal publication?
Ideas have consequences.
Ideas matter. Ideas always lead somewhere.
No idea lies fallow.
Every idea bears fruit.
Good ideas lead to good culture, good behavior, good community, good church, good corporations, and good government.
And bad ideas lead to bad government, bad corporations, bad culture, bad church, and bad behavior.
The ideas that we inculcate in our children today will bear themselves out in behavior in our culture tomorrow.
What you teach today in the classroom will be practiced tomorrow in the church and in the courtroom and in your living room.
Ideas have consequences.
And when we continue to teach this pablum of postmodern narcissistic subjectivity, Relativism.
We're going to bear nothing but subjective decisions that are grounded in nothing other than personal opinion and power.
When you lose veritas, truth, you don't get virtue.
You get vengeance.
You get victimization.
And you get a call for power to control all of those that you disagree with.
You get ideological fascism.
You don't get academic freedom.
And don't we see that prevailing on the college campuses across the land right now?
Well, people are always going to have conflicts, and the traditional way that people resolve conflicts was through appeals to reason and evidence.
And when people abandon reason and evidence, all that happens is they have to escalate their conflicts, their abuse, their intolerance, their insults, whatever you want to call it, until...
One dominates the other.
It becomes a sort of war of win-lose, rather than the ancient Socratic tradition, which is where if you instruct me on something that is wiser, that is something that is more verified, something that is more rational, then we both benefit.
But when we abandon reason and evidence, all we're left with is escalating injury and abuse to try and attempt to resolve conflicts in society.
And I'll go back to something I said just a minute ago, G.K. Chesterton.
When you get rid of the big laws, you don't get liberty, but rather thousands of little laws that rush in to fill the vacuum.
Chesterton also told us that if you want to have freedom, you better build a fence.
And he used the picture of a playground.
He said if you want to construct the largest playground in the world and you want your children to be free to play on that playground, you better build a fence because if you don't, You will constantly be worried of those children running out into the highways, the byways, and getting hurt.
You have to have the fence to have the freedom.
And that is so true in the paradox of discipline and freedom in our own lives.
If you want to have the freedom to play an instrument and participate in a concerto, you better learn the rules of rhyme and rhythm and cadence, the rules of music, otherwise you're going to be producing chaos, not the concerto.
If you want to play soccer, You better understand where the boundaries are and what the rules are and you better attend to the coach and to the referee because if you don't you can't participate in the game.
We recognize in the mundane issues such as sports and music and other things of daily living, playing on a playground, that with no rules you don't get liberty.
You get more and more constricted by power because somebody's going to have to control the chaos and that's where fascism comes in.
You must submit.
You must agree. And if you don't, we will squash you and we will silence you.
And that's what I would argue is taking place in the American Academy, if not the International Academy right now.
Ideological fascists trying to squash dissent and debate because they don't trust truth any longer, they have instead given their souls over to power.
And when we look at, you know, one of the great economic tragedies in America of the past generation was the crash that began in 07-08 and arguably is still continuing.
And the response seems to be, well, people did a lot of bad things.
They lied, they cheated, and then they begged for bailouts, which the government then provided.
And the fault was a lack of regulation, a lack of oversight.
And it seems to me, and I think you make this point in the book, it seems to me that if we teach people honor, honesty, courage, integrity from the beginning, then we don't need to chase after everyone with big books of regulations and play whack-a-mole with the infinite guises of human iniquity that result from not focusing early and strictly on moral beliefs.
Right. When we expunge culture of a moral barometer, if there is no measuring rod outside of those things being measured, C.S. Lewis tells us you can do no measuring.
You have to have an objective scale.
You have to have a preset measuring rod, a yardstick, a ruler.
You have to have an inch You have to have a meter.
You have to have something to make measurements, otherwise there's no agreement.
And if that agreement, if that referee, if that objective standard no longer exists, people cannot live in chaos very long.
They will start deferring to a strong man.
To someone who will control the discomfort and the disconnect and the discontent and the disillusionment that they feel in their daily relationships because as Lewis told us in Mere Christianity, even when little children are standing in line at the lunchroom, they'll say, wait a second, you cut in line. Wait a second, you stole my orange because we have an innate It's an unalienable, self-evident understanding of justice.
It's not what we make up on a daily basis by the construction of opinions.
It's endowed to us as a self-evident reality, the Imago Dei.
We are made in the image of God.
We are not the Imago Dog.
We don't just succumb to our instincts of power and appetite.
We have a moral barometer and we understand it, and even those who claim it doesn't exist will affirm it does exist when they say, you're wrong.
Or, you're intolerant.
They affirm the very thing they try to refute.
And my particular approach is to focus on sort of the rigorous philosophical aspect of these things.
And as has been noted by many great thinkers, it takes a lot of miseducation to overcome the basic moral instincts we're generally born with, unless we're complete sociopaths.
Now, I actually...
You've obviously been in academia a lot longer.
I was there as a student. Now, in the 90s, it was in the early 90s, I was just leaving my master's program, and I could see this sort of black wave of political correctness come surging over the horizon, which is one of the reasons I fled into the business world rather than go on to get a PhD.
But what do you think is driving this particular approach?
Because we're talking about some consequences, of course, but are there any...
Underpinnings that you feel are really driving this disintegration of a common set of ethics.
Oh boy, I think the first thing that comes to mind when you ask the question is narcissism.
You remember the story, and I'm sure the listeners do, the story of Narcissus.
He was running through the foothills of Mount Olympus on the hunt one day.
He was tired and exhausted.
He came upon a creek, a stream, and in the crook of this stream was a still, calm pool.
Narcissus being the son of the Greek god Cephasis, one of the most handsome and beautiful of all the gods, he knelt at the edge of the pool to get a drink and he saw what?
He saw his own image. There he knelt closer and closer, mesmerized, infatuated with himself.
He thought, ah, not even Bacchus or Zeus or Apollo or any of the gods are as handsome and beautiful as me.
And then he knelt closer and closer and he slipped and he fell in and he drowned.
And the end of the story is this.
If you listen to this day, you can hear off in the distance the tree nymph whose name was Echo as she pines after the loss of such wasted beauty.
Narcissism. Narcissist. Narcissism.
Narcissistic. Self-infatuation.
Self-love. This congratulation of self.
Elevation of self.
It's the original sin.
I shall be as God and define what's good and evil, right and wrong.
I don't need God any longer to do this.
And therefore I rise up in a postmodern way and deconstruct all truths that are self-evident and rebuild everything in my image because I want to squash you.
Because now I have the power to do so.
And I think also there has been, you know, with this basic idea that, well, you know, people who get really well educated end up making a lot of money and they're very successful in life and so on.
And so the idea, I think, in America and in other places in the West has been, let's try and get as many people into academics as possible so they can reap the benefits of I've struggled my whole life not to be an elitist.
But I do think that it's hard to make the case that when you cast the net wider, particularly with the collapsing standards in primary school and high school education, when you cast the net wider, don't you just have to lower the standards by default?
That's my criticism of common core.
Is education about what is common, what is average, or should education be about what is exceptional?
And should education focus on character rather than commonality?
I am very disturbed by the common core movement because in my judgment, It dumbs down education to nothing but the common, the average.
Rather than elevating education to the exceptional and to those virtues and that veritas that is revealed, rather than just giving me information, education should be teaching me about ethics.
Rather than teaching kids how to use a condom, education should be teaching them that character matters and that the Ten Commandments might actually be a more virtuous life than one of hedonism and self-gratification.
Education can't be dumbed down to the commonality of career.
It should be elevated to the exceptionality of ethics and virtue and veritas.
That's your tradition in Great Britain that the liberal arts academy was grounded in all those higher ideas, those first things of human existence, so that we could indeed enjoy the most liberty and freedom that a human race has ever had within the history of humanity.
And that came from classical liberalism, liberty, which ironically today as a conservative, I'm more classically liberal than my left of center counterpart because I believe in a context for freedom rather than government power and control.
Well, and I think the case can be very strongly made that as government continued to take over education and as values fragmented within society, you know, 19th century when the government took over education, the vast majority of people were Christians and a significant majority of Christians within the American experience were Protestants.
And so you could still have values in a government school because there was much more consistent monolith of values.
As multiculturalism and also value fragmentation, to put it mildly, has occurred, it seems that values have been taken out of children's education because whatever you teach that has values in it is going to offend some significant portion of the parents of the children.
Who are in the classroom.
And so we've ended up with this kind of empty, shallow, materialistic, pro forma kind of education, which doesn't get to the squishy, juicy bits of ethical conundrums that I think really motivate people and help guide their lives.
One of the things I do at Oklahoma Wesleyan is we ground every aspect of our institution in what we call the four pillars.
We abbreviate it and say the four Ps, and I'll give them to you quickly.
The primacy of Jesus Christ.
Jesus is the Son of God.
The priority of Scripture.
Scripture is the Word of God.
The pursuit of truth. Truth is given by God.
It is not made up by you or me.
And then the fourth one is the practice of wisdom.
Holiness, sanctification, obedience is demanded by God.
It's not optional. Practice what you preach.
When you put those four things together, you have a comprehensive, holistic view of what education should be.
You're not God.
God is. You don't define truth.
The Bible does.
Truth is an objective reality, not a postmodern subjective construct of your own liking and your own opinion.
And then finally, once you learn these things and put them in your head, practice them.
Practice what you preach.
Be men and women of integrity by integrating head and heart, fact and faith, belief and behavior, private and public life into a holistic life of integrity.
We're not segregationists.
We don't cut the baby in half and separate these things because when you do, culture dies, people die because they no longer have a common understanding that binds them together with the glue of humanity.
We separate and segregate ourselves into individual power bases that fight for our opinion to win rather than allowing the referee of truth to judge the debate and trusting it therein.
The rise of ad hominem seems to be almost the default position.
It just seems that the most common approach is who can fire the most slings and arrows of outrageous insults at each other.
Has that come to also dominate what occurs within academia?
I'm thinking about the University of Missouri recently where, you know, deans are driven out because of perceived lack of political correctness and so on.
There's no particular arguments.
There's just yelling and being offended.
Absolutely. And for the listener, I assume everybody knows what ad hominem is, but it's the attack of the person.
In other words, you shoot the messenger rather than attend to the message.
And frankly, if the messenger is bad, if the messenger is inarticulate, if the messenger doesn't suit your liking, it's irrelevant.
It's a non sequitur.
It has no basis in terms of defining the truth or the veracity of the message.
So we should be intellectually competent and honest people when we engage in ideas.
I think a good rule of thumb is always attack ideas but never attack people because the person that's expressing the idea really isn't the issue.
How you look, what your color is, what your gender is, what your choices are is irrelevant to the veracity of the claims you're making.
Attack ideas don't attack people but do we see that at Yale or Brown or the University of Missouri as these kids rise up and scream angry red faced In the face of those they disagree with simply because they didn't like an idea, but they tear down the person rather than even attending to the possibility that maybe that idea was superior to their own.
And the promotion of sentiment or feeling over reason.
I think that a lot of the Western tradition has been around, you know, feelings are important, but they're not tools of cognition.
Just because you're upset doesn't mean that somebody is being upsetting.
That's a subjective experience.
And even if somebody is being upsetting towards you, that is no place in the intellectual argument.
When I was a kid growing up, you know, I grew up in England with lots of debates and arguments and so on.
And the first person to burst into tears generally lost.
But now, the first person to burst into tears generally gets a big safe space and a promotion to epistemological reality.
Yeah, you know, here's one of the things that really gets under my skin these days.
Christians, conservatives such as myself, are often accused of being anti-science.
But yet, the arguments that are often used against us are almost solely, solely grounded in feeling rather than fact.
Let's take, for example, the gender debate, transgender debate.
We are actually being told today that a woman does not factually exist, that a female is not an ontological biological fact, but rather a female is nothing but a postmodern construct, a feeling, a fabrication, a fancy, if you will, of somebody who thinks they are one.
Now, how in the world is it that I'm anti-science when I want to tend to the facts Of biology, of ontology, of genetics, and of chemistry.
Why is it that I'm anti-science by saying a woman objectively exists, and the person who is predicating his views on nothing but feeling and fabrication is the one that's pro-science?
The world is upside down.
It's like Isaiah 5 tells us.
Left is right, and right is wrong, and darkness is light, and light is darkness.
Bitter is sweet, and sweet is bitter.
Woe unto them who reverse these categories.
Now, I know we were a little pressed for time.
I wonder if you could close us off with what I found to be one of the most chilling stories in your book, which was the assignment that you give to the freshmen coming in to watch Spielberg's movie Schindler's List and some of the responses that you get out of there.
Well, this was a story of, I had assigned the movie Schindler's List to the students to watch, and I wanted them to write a three-page paper critiquing it.
And one young lady named Frankie did.
She watched the movie.
She obviously attended to the details.
She wrote a decent paper that summarized the facts and details of Schindler's List, the movie of the Holocaust, quite accurately.
But her concluding sentence was this, and this is what the listeners should be left with.
Her concluding sentence was this, Who am I to judge the Germans?
This young lady, an 18-year-old straight out of our high schools in America, had been so indoctrinated with post-modern nihilism, moral nihilism, that she felt that she had no basis to judge the Holocaust as being a bad, immoral thing.
Who was she to judge the Germans?
If we've really come to the point as a culture where Veritas has been lost, and now we can't even judge Shooting Jews in the head and burning them in furnaces as being an immoral bad thing, then we need to recognize that education has lost its way and that this ideological fascism will lead to nothing but more atrocity at the hands of powerful men rather than the liberty that's granted to us within the laws of God.
Well, and there are strong arguments to be made that Hitler himself and his cadre were significant relativists who placed nation above virtue.
So there is a kind like refusing to judge the Germans, the Nazis, is one of the ways in which the road to hell is paved to create more of them.
Because once we give up any kind of moral standards, what do we subject ourselves to?
We subject ourselves to the loudest, most vicious, most violent, most aggressive people around because we all have to make decisions.
And if we have no standards, we're going to end up with ever escalating aggression.
Absolutely. And again, we'll bring it back full circle.
University of Missouri, Yale, Brown, many of the public institutions.
And mark my words, this will get worse in the days ahead as the election draws nearer.
You will see this fascism.
You must submit. You must agree.
You must be one of us.
Or we will silence you.
We will expel you. We will get you fired.
Because the academy is no longer a place for open and robust exchange of ideas.
It's a place to indoctrinate and force with power agreement.
And that's the antithesis of what a liberal arts institution should be.
I can't top that.
So thank you very much, Dr.
Piper, for your time. Really, really appreciate it.
And of course, link to your book and to your articles below.
