Oct. 24, 2017 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:54:33
3870 The Postmodernism Debate | Thaddeus Russell and Stefan Molyneux
What is the intellectual history of postmodernism and what impact does it have on the world today? Stefan Molyneux and Thaddeus Russell outline the origins of the controversial intellectual movement and debate the overall existence of truth. Thaddeus Russell is an affiliated scholar at Willamette University and has taught at Columbia University, Barnard College, Eugene Lang College, Occidental College, and the New School for Social Research. He is the host of the Unregistered podcast, founder of Renegade University and the author of “A Renegade History of the United States.” Website: http://www.thaddeusrussell.comTwitter: http://www.twitter.com/thaddeusrussellYour 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, Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio, and this is going to be a very exciting debate.
I've been looking forward to this for quite some time.
We are here with Dr. Thaddeus Russell.
He is an affiliated scholar at Williamette University, and he's taught at Columbia University, Barnard College, Eugene Lang College, Occidental College, and the New School for Social Research.
He is the host of the unregistered Thank you so much for taking the time today.
Thanks for doing this.
This is great.
So for the listeners as well, Thaddeus is doing a course, Introduction to Postmodernism.
If you go to ThaddeusRussell.com, there is a discount code, which is S-T-E-F-A-N.
No relation, actually quite a relation.
So if you want to check that out.
And we're going to be discussing postmodernism.
And wait! Come back!
This is gripping stuff.
This is everywhere in society.
It is very prevalent in academia.
And through academia, of course, it is filtered through to mainstream media.
It is filtered through to the art world.
It is a many-storied, deeply-layered, and long-history intellectual movement, which...
A lot of people don't really have much of a grasp on, and we're going to try and unpack.
I think that's a good phrase to use in postmodernism.
We're going to try and unpack what it's all about.
But if you don't mind, first, I'm always fascinated by intellectual history, like how people get to where they got to.
This is not environmental determinism, but of course we all have our historical history.
Influences. But you have, in particular, a very rich history of intellectual ferment, of curiosity, of chaos and discipline.
I wonder if you could tell us, well, me, I know some of the story, our listeners, a little bit about your personal history from childhood onwards, because I think it's really quite fascinating.
Yeah, I'm also fascinated by how people got to where they are intellectually.
And on my podcast, that's what I do quite a bit, in fact.
And it's really illuminating.
And I, you know, I As you sort of said, I don't like to do environmental determinism or...
The thing that I really hate is sort of psychoanalyzing people in order to dismiss them, which people do to me.
In fact, just last night, someone tweeted to me, said something like, it is obvious that Thad's politics are all about the rage against his parents.
And I said, well, you know, that's true.
Do you have a point to make?
It's not an argument.
Even if it's true, it's not an argument.
I mean, it's partly true, of course.
But anyway, yes.
So I was born in Berkeley, California in 1965.
And that should tell you a lot right there.
But on top of that, my parents were, in fact, revolutionary socialists.
And I've actually said to people, and this is true, and they don't understand what this means, but they were professional revolutionaries because there were Trotskyist sects at that time.
And they were a member of a Trotskyist organization called the International Socialists, whose mission was to organize the working class for revolution.
and the only way to do that, of course, is to become a worker, because none of them were.
They were all, you know... Middle-class or upper-class kids who went to UC Berkeley or University of Chicago or Harvard or Yale.
And so they dropped out of bourgeois society and got jobs as steelworkers and truck drivers and clerical workers, which is what my parents did.
My stepfather was the son of a State Department diplomat who was raised in Bethesda, Maryland in a leafy suburb and went to University of Chicago.
And he became a steelworker and then a teamster truck driver for Safeway.
And I don't know if you know, but they failed in organizing the working class for Socialist Revolution.
That didn't quite work out for them.
I haven't seen a huge change in the flags, so I'm going to assume that this was not quite the arc that they wanted.
I mean, I haven't checked the news in a while, but I don't think that worked out.
So, yeah, they finally gave up.
And also, the thing I do respect about my parents, In part, is that they realized that they liked the good things in life.
They were very interested in things like French food and travel and, you know, the nice stuff that capitalism produces.
And so they dropped out and got nice bourgeois lives to make some money.
And ever since then, they've been basically apolitical, but very interested in the good things in life.
But that was, you know, until I was about 13, 14, that was my life.
It was being around these hardcore socialist revolutionaries.
And we also lived in the southwest corner of Berkeley, which is basically the hood in Berkeley.
It's right on the border of Oakland.
If anybody's from there, that's right near the Ashby BART station, so you know what I'm talking about.
And that was also three blocks from the national headquarters of the Black Panther Party.
So they were around.
Of course, hippies were around.
Counterculture was around.
Lots of weed was around.
My biological father.
My parents were divorced when I was five.
My biological father was also a member of that party.
He dropped out a little bit earlier, and he became sort of a hedonist, nudist, pot-smoking weirdo.
So that was my life.
And I was ambivalent about it for a long time, in part because they were just terrible parents, because they were much more interested in being in the revolution than they were in me.
And in being parents. And I certainly became an anti-Marxist and an anti-socialist, but that took a while.
But the thing that I did hold on to, and this is still in my work and in my thinking, was what I referred to earlier, which was their unabashed...
Desire to have nice material things, to have a good life in that way.
And they were unashamed of it. People on the left, and this is what really turned me off to the left later, this really began my turn away from the left, was I noticed that leftists, and I hung around with nothing but leftists for most of my childhood and early adulthood, either... People weren't aware of the sensual things in life, or popular culture, or the clothes they wore, or they looked down on it.
So it was anti-materialist in a puritanical way.
I'm not moralizing, I just don't like that.
I liked watching TV, and I like having clothes that feel good and make me look good.
I like taking trips to, you know, a Mexican resort town, etc.
But that was, when I was in graduate school at Columbia, I'm skipping ahead here, sorry.
But, you know, I noticed right away that all the professors there didn't seem to notice what most American people were doing with their lives, most of which was spent, you know, watching TV, going to the movies and talking about Kim Kardashian.
Now, whatever you think about that, I mean, it's First of all, you're not understanding American people, the ordinary people, but also there was this, as I said, there's sort of an ascetic, an ascetic sensibility that permeates much of the left that really turned me off.
I just found it sterile, mean.
Not that it was scolding, although that was part of it, but like mean in that it was narrowing.
It narrowed the human existence.
And was sort of, it reminded me of early Christians.
You know, it reminded me of this, the old Christian ascetic idea, which Paul lays out in Epistle to the Romans, right?
Very clearly, you know, sacrifice your body to serve God.
For the socialists, it was sacrifice your body, meaning all the sensual pleasures in the world, the worldly pleasures, for a new God, the state or the community.
And that was my turn.
I was about in my late 20s when I was in graduate school at Columbia.
But it took a while. It took a long time.
I went to a hippie college, Antioch College in Ohio, which was the student body was dominated by anarchists and punk rockers and lesbians.
Which, again, mixed.
So there was a lot of what we call now political correctness and lots of moral shaming and lots of surveillance of one's thoughts and And words, although less then than there is now, but there was still some of that.
But then there was also, you know, a lot of enjoying the finer things in life, like getting high and being naked and rolling around on the grass during a rainstorm, you know?
I mean, kind of hippie countercultural stuff, which I found to be, and I still find to be, quite liberating.
And I think that's the one thing the hippies gave us.
They said a lot of stupid stuff.
But I think there is something in there that is, that in American society, American culture, And in Western culture generally, but I think it's more pronounced in American culture, it doesn't allow for or really shuns.
And when I say American culture, I'm talking about what I call formal culture.
Obviously, if you turn on a television or go on the internet for five minutes, you're going to see a world awash in hedonism.
You're going to see people celebrating all sorts of things like drinking and sex and all the rest of it.
When I say formal culture, I mean the things that...
The politicians say, the school teachers say, the football coaches say, big business leaders say, which is almost uniformly, and has been for 300 years, puritanical.
And that crosses parties, that crosses ideology.
There's no politician who's ever not basically played the puritanical game, which is to say, yeah, to be a good American, Is to work hard all the time, no matter what you get for it.
That's the Puritan work ethic.
To be a family member, a nuclear family member, forever.
To not have sex outside, you know, your marriage.
And best of all, serve as a soldier fighting for the country.
And the greatest American, of course, according to this, is the soldier who dies for his country.
The ultimate, the ultimate ascetic Sacrifice.
And I found that the left, socialists in particular, have exactly the same cultural politics as all the puritanical, bourgeois, capitalist leaders in this country.
So that's when I turned away from the left, and I've had that journey.
I've been going on that journey for about 25 years now.
It is funny too, Thaddeus, because there is, I think, quite a common correlation that is somewhat under-discussed in these kinds of conversations between abstract ideals and personal indifference.
There is an old saying that somebody said, you know, the more I love mankind in the abstract, the more I dislike every individual that I meet.
And with regards to parenting, you know, like I want to save the working class, I want to reform the society.
But of course, if you're a chaotic or neglectful or abusive parent yourself...
Then you are trying to save an abstract category while not being particularly positive to your immediate flesh and blood.
And this curse of a love of abstractions and an indifference to tangible blood-related manifestations of humanity in your own house has always struck me as kind of peculiar.
There was a little bit of this. I don't think quite as much for good and bad reasons in my own household, but that's always struck me as a really fascinating divide in human nature.
Yes, that was another thing that turned me off.
I completely agree with you. I mean, I think this is true for all political ideologies, but I do think it's worse on the left.
I mean, I'm not a conservative.
I've never been a conservative.
I'm an anti-conservative. But I do find conservatives to be more pleasant, generally, than people on the left.
Yeah, I was very turned off by the personalities of people on the left, and political people generally, sort of still am.
But especially, God, those, you know, Columbia professors and the socialists hanging out in Manhattan and Brooklyn.
Just, yes, mean-spirited, no, zero empathy for people sitting right next to them.
It wasn't just family, but, you know, anyone who was around them.
But they had tremendous love for humanity, which was an abstraction, of course.
I mean, they wanted to save, and this goes for progressives especially, they wanted to save people who were nothing but abstractions, numbers to them.
Again, first of all, that's imperialistic.
So they were running counter to their own ideology in that way.
They spoke on behalf of People they never met, they never will meet, they only know as numbers.
They only know maybe that they exist somewhere in the world, that we need to save them.
We know what they need and we need to save them.
So that was another reason I found the whole enterprise of left-wing politics to be not for me.
And there is a certain religiosity in that to me, in that when I sort of think of...
More fundamentalist, or I guess you could say consistent forms of religiosity, there is a love of the abstraction, which is the deity, and to some degree an indifference to the individual, because you must bend or distort sometimes the individual in service of the religious abstractions.
And this love of abstractions and indifference to the individuality or individuation of the people around you is a It's a wild phenomenon, and I wish people talked about it more, because to me now, it's almost like when I see somebody who's really wedded to or in love with abstract categories,
whether they are class or even race or gender, if there are these massive, overweening, towering cliffs of abstractions in their minds, I'm almost certain that that is a thick glass through which they cannot see ordinary, individualized human beings.
Yes. You know, it's funny.
I've been thinking lately. This is sort of self-negating.
And it's also an attack on you, too.
It's an attack on all intellectuals, in a way.
Political intellectuals. I think this is an intellectual problem.
I think that anybody who's intellectual...
So right now I'm writing a book on the history of American foreign relations, which includes both sort of the spread of popular culture abroad and, you know, the military conflicts, the military engagements and military interventions.
There is not a single military intervention in the history of the United States that wasn't dreamed up by an intellectual.
Not one of them. Not one of them.
They all came out of some office in Harvard or Columbia University.
Every single one of them.
Of course, because ordinary people are busy working and raising families and doing the day-to-day.
The upper-class people who have the time and the material resources to sit in their offices and sit at their studies and think about stuff and look at maps and know where Syria is and then decide, we need to do something in Syria.
It's all from intellectuals.
But it's also this tendency, as you're saying, to think of people...
To be interested in abstractions, that's what we do as intellectuals.
That's what sets us apart in a sense.
It's abstract thinking. We, intellectuals, basically, by definition, are able to think about larger things outside of our immediate environment.
Yeah, it's a problem.
And I think it's something, of course, I'm not saying we should stop being political intellectuals, but I think it's something that we should always guard against.
And Hayek, I guess, basically pointed to this with his knowledge problem.
Theory, you know, which I think is brilliant and I think he's right on.
You know, we simply do not know and we cannot know what most people need or want.
We simply cannot. The vast majority of people, we simply cannot know what their lives are like, what they want, what they need.
And most of all, he said, of course, was that we shouldn't attempt to impose our own values, ideas, ways of life on them because of that.
Right. In your, I guess, sort of very short autobiography that you have on your website, there was a paragraph here, because you talk about the aesthetic.
And don't worry, people, we'll get to the debate in a second, but I'd just like to get to know people first.
Buy him a drink before we retire.
So, because this aestheticism that you talk about, this sort of higher morality, this self-discipline, and so on...
On the left, I also find associated with, like, it's a very thin veneer, you know, as you point out, sort of civilization and its discontents, you know, this seething id and this sort of super ego that has to clamp it down.
Because in your family, you know, there was, of course, you know, the mother, the father, the kids, a bit of a sort of traditional middle class situation.
And then, you know, your mom left for this Cocaine using, was a grad student or something like that.
And so you went from, the parents go from fairly, I guess, somewhat traditional, although intellectually not so.
And then you write this, you say, so my mother left us when I was four and my brother was two.
My father, even though he was now in charge of two children, seized the breakup as an opportunity to conduct his own sexual revolution.
Women paraded through our house.
Loud sex was an almost nightly activity.
And fuck, entered my vocabulary before I could write a complete sentence.
My father took up photography, built a darkroom in a closet, and became an amateur pornographer, using his girlfriends as models.
In an apocalyptic act of rebellion against his parents, he photographed his penis lying down in the gutter of his opened copy of the Book of Mormon, framed it, and displayed it on our mantle.
And you talk about his nudism and his drug growing and somewhat selling and so on.
And that's, again, a wild pendulum with not much of a center from somewhat of a traditional structure with asceticism to rank sort of fornication 24-7 kind of thing.
And that is something I have seen a little bit more on the left than on the right.
On the right, you, of course, have the sort of traditional televangelist who rails against homosexuality and then almost inevitably is found in a London underground bathroom with George Michael or something like that.
Like, that's almost an inevitability.
It's almost like dominoes going down.
So there is that kind of duality.
But it does really, it struck me quite strongly, this kind of stuff with your own upbringing.
Yes, indeed. Sorry, there's not a question.
I mean, I wish there was, but I just wanted to...
No, I'd love a question.
I don't know how to respond to that.
I mean, except that yes, I agree with all that, I guess.
Yeah, the sort of middle class normalcy.
I mean, I guess that wasn't in a way...
Well, it was there for, you know, a minute in my childhood.
I mean, I don't... And I don't remember it because my parents split up when I was five, as I said.
So... And then from then on, it was all pretty much just crazy, countercultural, Berkeley hippie stuff.
But, yeah, I don't know.
At the... The one thing that I think didn't screw me up was my father's nudism and his sexual proclivities.
Actually, people often think, oh my god, you heard your dad have sex every night.
I said, yeah, I don't know.
I still am not sure that that did anything to me.
What definitely was a problem for me, and still is a problem for me, Was there inattention, you know, complete inattention?
So, for instance, I was never once ever asked about my grades in school.
I mean, school, what was happening in school, not one question ever for 13 years.
And, of course, I was in public schools, which were nightmares.
And, you know, and so, you know, consequently, I got C's and D's and ended up with a C average and had no prospects for Going to college, much less becoming an intellectual.
So I had to claw my way up from there and I managed to do it, but you know, against all of that.
And that was because they were so interested in other people, in particular people who were abstract notions.
And I also think it's interesting how they ended up, you talk about this more with your mom, interest in French cooking, that wonderful statement she said that she identifies with a black man up the street who polishes his Cadillac every Saturday.
That it's interesting because they dipped into manual labor.
And, you know, I got my first job when I was 10 and worked a lot of manual jobs in my youth.
there is something bracing and connecting about actually making stuff in the real world.
You know, a lot of intellectuals go from sort of middle class abstract households into academia, and they don't actually build something that doesn't require a huge amount of ink or hypertext.
You know, like they don't actually build stuff that is used in the real world.
The connection between sort of abstracts, concepts, language and things, you know, you go build a bridge, the connection between the abstractions and the thing that stands in the world that is objective.
Well, we'll get to that, of course, when we start discussing this stuff.
But I think that the connection between concepts, language and things in the world is easier, perhaps even more seductive to maintain when your ideas get translated into things in the world that exist independent of interpretation.
If all you do is write text, then your text can be reinterpreted and it's easy to get lost in self-referential language.
So I thought it was interesting how your parents go from...
Abstract workers or knowledge workers into manual laborers, truck drivers and steel workers, as you point out.
And then they kind of end up middle class.
I don't know if that's connected or not, but I just thought that was interesting because in my own sort of history, you know, I mean, the labor that goes from concept to objective things in the world.
And this can be things like computer programs.
I spend a lot of time as a software entrepreneur.
Computer programs, you know, to some degree, they work or they don't, and it's an objective thing.
So your thoughts are being translated into a more objective medium.
I think physical labor or making real things in the real world can be kind of a path to help establish that, you know, rightly or wrongly, epistemologically, that does seem to be a bit of a pattern.
Yeah, I envy carpenters, you know, and I do.
And I don't know if I would actually be, you know, how long I would like doing it, but I do know that I crave physical activity.
I crave...
I'm into martial arts.
I love punching a heavy bag.
It's heaven to me.
It's like going to church for me.
In part because I have to be in that moment outside my head.
I live all day in my head, like I'm sure you do and most of us do who do this kind of work.
Real quickly, I guess, I want to say that I think what you're pointing to there, and this might lead into our discussion or debate, whatever you want to call it.
What I think you're talking about is what we often refer to as the mind-body dualism, or mind-body binary, right?
Which has been, I think, central in Western culture since about Plato.
You know, and it's this idea that, you know, this human soul is made up of two parts, the mind and the body, and the mind is where rationality is, and where discipline is, and where work is.
It's the ascetic part, and the body is where the sex is, and the leisure is, and the, you know, and that we...
The devil. And we privilege the mind over the body.
And then we've associated, historically, certain groups of people with the mind and other groups of people with the body.
And probably don't have to go through this, but, you know, it's pretty obvious to most people that, you know, in this culture in America, you know, it's been historically blacks have been associated with the body and whites with the mind and gays with the body and straights with the mind, etc.
So, yeah. Now, I think that's a fabrication.
I think that's a social construct.
There you go. There's your segue.
We'll start. We'll start.
Well, and this was explicit in the Middle Ages, of course.
There was actually the body politic.
I mean, you think this is like the social body.
This was actually, you know, that the priests were the soul, that the aristocracy was the brain, that the serfs were the hands.
You know, like this was actually divvied up in very explicit ways in the past.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, I mean, I think it's a social construct, but I also think, and this very much is a segue into our discussion about postmodernism, So it's nonetheless very real in that we internalize this idea.
And I have, you know, still, I still have it inside of me.
I sort of just have this natural, natural, I have this assumption that it's hard to get rid of that, yes, people who are scientists are better than basketball players.
Right? Not according to the market.
Yeah. Well, thank you.
Exactly. This is why Mises was so beautiful, so wonderfully correct about that.
Value is subjective.
Yeah, it's something I struggle with.
But yeah, so let's go.
Okay, so let's, assuming little particular, I have a pretty wide swathe in the audience, and assuming little particular knowledge of the sort of backstory, history, and origins, and feel free to take your time here.
Like, we can stretch this out as long as our bladders can handle it.
Ooh, there's another mind-body dichotomy for you.
I got a great idea, but I gotta pee.
How would you introduce the concept of postmodernism and its validity to a general layperson audience?
Yeah, okay. So, postmodernism is this word that gets thrown around all the time.
Certainly lately, a lot.
I'm not exactly sure why, but in the last few years, and you know this, I mean, I've heard this talked about endlessly on all sorts of podcasts, and it's been written about.
And it's been attacked widely.
The criticism I see, generally speaking, is that it is the cause of all the stuff that's going on on college campuses.
Social justice, warrior politics, identity politics.
Which, and we can get into this later, we'll unpack that, but to me that is absolutely contradictory to the texts that I've read that everyone agrees are the sort of core texts of what we call postmodernism.
So rather than talk about postmodernism, because now I'm not sure what that word means, I would love to talk about the people who wrote the texts and the texts themselves That have been associated with postmodernism.
And by the way, on this, there is agreement among the critics and the proponents of postmodernism, which is that Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida are the two major philosophers who we associate with postmodernism.
And there are others as well, but pretty much everyone agrees that those are central.
No, I think obviously we should start with the text.
I mean, as an empiricist, let's start with the language and forget the interpretations because they're much more debatable than the language itself.
Yeah, okay. So what...
It's interesting. I am a big fan of Foucault, although I'm always struggling with his ideas, too.
I really, really think he's brilliant, and I really do think his work is liberatory, but I also am never sure I am actually a Foucaultian, believe it or not.
Foucault starts with basically history.
He is a historian. He writes He began with a history of the asylum, mental institutions, and he began with a history of the state, for the most part, deciding who is crazy, who is mentally ill, and therefore who should be placed in mental institutions against their will.
This is, to me, and I think most libertarians, and I'm not a libertarian, but I think I totally agree with him on this, Perhaps the worst abuse of state power ever in history.
And what he showed was...
I'm sorry, just to interject to sort of make that contemporaneous as well, this whole question about ADHD, Ritalin, psychological medications for those who are not conforming to a really disastrous and often anti-male educational system run by the government.
Well, you're mentally ill, you have a deficiency in your brain, you need your reuptake inhibitors, and therefore take this adult form of speed, which has been barely tested on children, which can shrink your brain mass by up to 10%.
So this stuff is very, very, and I would think even more so than in the past.
It's a very huge issue.
Yeah, take the pill so that you can succeed in a state system, right?
And so that's actually what my son is facing right now.
He's a junior in high school and a public school.
Unfortunately. And right now he's saying he wants to...
I shouldn't say this, but...
Well, anyway, it's now a question of whether, you know...
He's not flourishing, exactly, in that environment.
No, he hates it. And I'm proud of him, in a way, for hating it, right?
He's doing basically what I was doing at the time, which was not understanding what this is all about.
This has no meaning, and it's completely boring to me.
Why am I here? And so he doesn't do well.
And now... He's going gold in a statist environment.
Yes. So there's all this cultural pressure on him.
To medicate so that he can succeed in that environment.
And of course, my attitude is, well, why do we want to succeed in that environment?
But anyway, so that's terrible, but it's not as bad as what Foucault described, and everyone knows this history, I think, you know, which is until the 1980s, this was standard practice in Western societies, which was that the state, usually sometimes the church, but usually the state, and increasingly the state in the 20th century, He said, you're crazy, you're crazy, you're crazy, and you go into these basically prisons, and where you're going to get treated.
And of course, they weren't often treated.
I mean, there was electroshock therapy done on prisoners in mental institutions into the 1980s.
There were lobotomies done, all coercively, right?
And now, what Foucault showed was that the definitions of mental illness, of pathology, changed.
Over time and over space.
So that in the 19th century, there were particular categories which were considered to be mental illnesses.
And then in the 20th century, those changed.
They added, they subtracted, they modified.
So the most famous one, of course, is homosexuality.
And I'm sure a lot of people have heard about this.
Homosexuality was a mental illness, according to the American Psychiatric Association, until 1972 or 3.
And there were many, many people who were put into those prisons because they were homosexuals.
Here and in the UK, and I think in Western Europe as well, but I know certainly here in the UK, some of them were sterilized forcibly, most famously Alan Turing.
But many, many people were, or they were just kept in these prisons for the rest of their lives.
For things that now we would see as simply being gay.
Well, and Foucault, of course, as a gay man who was not immune to the temptations of S&M, was also, of course, fighting a particularly personal battle, which, again, doesn't discredit any of the arguments, but it does explain why the focus may have been particularly intense on this.
And all you have to do is, of course, look at this flourishing...
I don't know, it's almost like a virus or some sort of mushrooming definition of dysfunction in the mind that go through the iterations of the DSM, right?
The sort of Bible, they just sit around, they make stuff up, there's no particular objective tests, it's all language-based dysfunction, and there's virtually no criticism of the environment.
It is all a failure to adapt to what is, I think, particularly for kids, becoming an increasingly anti-rational environment.
Yeah, so right, exactly.
So psychiatrists have for centuries been defining for us, for us because they're the experts and because they use science, whether or not we're crazy.
And when we're crazy, you know, either the state comes in and does things for us to save us, or maybe a missionary comes in and saves us, or maybe a school counselor tells us we should take this pill, or maybe we just suffer a whole lot of social ostracism.
Because the experts using the scientific method have told us that we're crazy and everybody knows that we're crazy.
And this is a Soviet thing, too.
I mean, because under Stalin, in particular, the Soviet system was by definition perfect.
Therefore, anybody who failed to adapt to it was by definition insane and got locked away in a darkroom and had horse tranquilizers stuffed up their ass or something.
I mean, just really brutal repression of any disagreement with social norms, which I think historically have been, particularly with Stalinist Russia, been proven to be horrendously totalitarian and destructive.
Absolutely. And so Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, Mao's China, the United States of America, the United Kingdom.
This was all done in the name of science, by the way.
This was the use of science, I should say, by the state to justify repression and social control.
In this country, it was the progressives, mostly, in the sort of turn of the 20th century, who were really keen on modern science and psychiatry in particular, And so they started to measure people and they started to, you know, measure their craniums and the size of their foreheads and their noses and look at their skin color and then determined by scientific method that certain people were simply inferior biologically, were innately inferior to others.
And so we should weed them out of the population.
And that was eugenics. And that was done with state power.
That was forcible by court order, sterilization.
Of tens of thousands of people in the first 50 to 60 years of the 20th century in the United States.
And one thing a lot of people don't know is this was actually mostly not racist.
The eugenicists were not actually, for the most part, racist.
They believed that the problem was inferior genes within races.
So most of the people, very few people know this, most of the people who were sterilized in this country, it was about 50,000 people, were whites.
The vast majority of people who were sterilized for eugenic reasons in the United States were whites.
Yeah, so that was all done by scientists.
This was, and this was, by the way, the scientific consensus.
There was very little disagreement among scientists.
And I mean, you know, scientists at Harvard, scientists working for the government, these were the elite scientists in the society, mostly believed this stuff, in addition to what we now call scientific racism, which was racism.
You know, this was the belief that there were also Various races of people in the world, you know, in Europe, there were, this was common, this was the consensus until World War II, in Europe, there were four or five races of people.
So, the Northern Europeans were Nordics, and the Central Europeans were Alpines, and the Southern Europeans were Mediterranean, and the Jews were maybe another race, so some of those four races.
Of white people. And the Irish, for a time earlier, were a separate race as well.
And sometimes the consensus was that the Irish and the Italians and the Jews were actually not even human.
They were more like chimpanzees, simians.
You know, and this, again, this was consensus science.
This was settled science for about a century.
Until World War II. In World War II, they changed their minds.
This is something I'm writing about right now.
Now we need some fighting arms.
So let's make everyone human so we can draft them.
So we have to go to war.
Well, we want to go to war so that we can control Europe and all of its industrial goodies and all those people, all those workers, and have our power.
This is the globalist agenda.
And they were explicit about it.
That's what I love about them at the time in the 30s and 40s.
They were saying this straight up.
I mean, they weren't announcing it in the New York Times, but it's written down and they were saying, no, we need to have control of Europe.
We're not going to colonize it, but we're going to make sure that we manage, manage the world.
We have managerial power, not direct colonial power, but managerial power.
So here's the thing.
Americans and Canadians don't want to go to war.
This was in the 1930s.
They really don't want to go to war because they realized the last war was a bunch of blood and treasure for nothing.
And they still don't want to go to war.
So what we have to do is we have to make sure that they believe that racism is this terrible thing.
And oh, lo and behold, we have these racists over there.
They're the worst racists.
Now, here's the problem, though.
We have divided the world into all these different races of people in our own minds by our own scientists.
We have Europeans, even. White people who look like this are five different races.
What does that mean? How can they join together in one single army to go fight the Nazis and the Japanese?
So they invented... It wasn't invented, but they made it dominant, this idea of the Caucasian, this new category.
It had been around, but it was sort of a marginal idea.
That became the dominant idea in the 1940s.
And this was anthropologists, Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, and people like that, were actually employed by the United States government to propagate this, to write books, articles, give lectures.
And it became the thing.
It was in the New York Times every day.
The Caucasians, it includes Jews, Irish, Italians, were all Caucasians.
And the Negroes...
They're a separate race, but they're not as bad as we thought they were.
They are biologically different, but they're not inferior.
So they left in this contradiction in their theory.
So the Negroes would be the support troops.
They wouldn't do combat, but they would participate.
Now, that didn't go over too well with black people who, by and large, resisted the draft at incredible rates, heroically, I will say.
But the Caucasian race was invented.
And guess what? When the census taker comes to your door, Or you're applying to college?
That's what it still says.
Caucasian. Well, and then, of course, the whole idea of diversity now, that if you have, let's say, a company, and on the I think it comes out of this particular process.
Yeah, so according to this idea, everyone, you know, someone from the South Caucasus mountains in Russia is the same race as a Norwegian who is the same race as a Portuguese.
It makes no sense whatsoever, yet it is still the dominant way of thinking in this country.
Foucault. Foucault comes along and Derrida, mostly Foucault though, and says, here's what we can do.
With these so-called truth claims, you know, truth claims is what he's talking about.
So there were truth claims about mental illness.
Scientists said this is a mental illness.
For women, neurasthenia, this nervous condition, that was considered to be this biological condition, you know, it's an illness.
That's a truth. That's just true.
We've studied it. That there is...
That there are five races of Europeans, or one race of Europeans, those are truth claims as well.
Scientists, these were scientists using the scientific method.
They observed, they recorded their observations, they analyzed their observations, and they concluded from that that there are five or one or ten or 150,000 races, whatever it was.
He said, you know what we can do with all truth claims?
We can simply study the history of them.
That in itself was radical, a radical intervention, that a truth claim, there can be a history of it, an origin, an origin, meaning you can go back in time and actually identify the moment when this thing was first uttered, when it was first written down, when someone first spoke this idea that this is the truth.
And we can do this with pretty much everything, I think.
But he certainly started there.
He started with mental illness and race and gender.
And he said, yeah, there were moments in history when particular moments Particular people, in particular places, and often, not always, but often, for particular reasons, who invented these truth claims.
And so, this is what people get confused about.
He kind of stopped there.
For the most part, Foucault did not say, therefore, it's all shit, and we should destroy all of it, that all categories are worthless, and he does not say this.
Worthless and meaningless, and we should just wipe out the whole thing.
He just says, all that does is, it makes it possible to go your own way.
Because a truth claim uttered by authorities serves two functions.
It stops the conversation.
When an authority figure says, this is the truth, what he's saying is, don't ask any questions.
And it also says that your destiny is determined.
Already, regardless of what you do, it takes away your agency.
In fact, it says you have no agency.
So what Foucault said was, you know what we can do?
If someone says you're X, Y, or Z, you're a Caucasian, or you're a psychotic, or you're white, whatever it is, go look at the origin of that claim, the history of it, and then you'll see that it's changed over time, which tells us that it's really not biological and eternal and absolute.
And therefore, maybe you can change it too, meaning it's historically contingent.
If it's historically contingent, you can make history as well.
Now, there are constraints, of course, but you can participate in that historical process.
You can determine your own destiny, how you were born, the color of your skin, your genitalia, whatever it is, your particular tendency to be anti-authoritarian, by the way.
That's a lot of people were thrown in mental institutions who were simply anti-authoritarian.
You can do what you want, for the most part.
At least you have some say.
And the other thing he said, and then I'll finish, and this is also very important, also totally misunderstood, and go to History of Sexuality Volume 1.
He's very clear on this.
It's a radical, anti-Marxist, anti-left idea that I think is completely right.
He says, power is not top-down.
Power moves from the bottom to the top, from the top to the bottom.
It moves in a circular way.
It moves up and down, back and forth, sideways, laterally.
That we, even the bottom of society, even slaves and the workers and women and gays and the oppressed people, they also circulate power.
They create power. They re-inscribe it.
They also participate in In power relations.
They're not just victims.
They're not just oppressed.
They do have agency and they have historically.
And I thought that also was a radical, revolutionary and liberatory idea that Foucault gave us.
Right. Well, I mean, there's a lot in there.
I'll just sort of touch on areas of agreement, Thaddeus, which is, of course, growing up in England, you know, the question of the aristocracy was important.
It's very central to British society, and people who don't sort of know that history have a tough time understanding what goes on in England in particular.
But of course, you know, the old-style way of looking at the aristocracy was that they were your betters appointed by God, you know, to rule over you, and they were there speaking in God's name and so on.
And therefore, any disagreement with them was disagreement with God, which was disagreement with virtue, and so on, right?
And that's not true.
I know we'll get into the whole truth thing as we go forward, but let's just say it does not accord with empirical evidence.
Another way of looking at them, and I remember I played Macbeth when I was younger in the theater, and I was like, it's hard to...
I sort of miss the point that Macbeth is like the best murderer around.
You know, he was really, really good at killing people.
And if you look at the aristocracy as, wow, they were really the most enlightened and efficient murderers in the service of repression.
And it's sort of like the mafia floating up.
You know, the mafia doesn't claim the divide right of kings and so on.
And so they were just a mafia with, you know, orbiting priesthood justifications like rings around Saturn.
And so if you go, and we do this with language all the time, and look at the word liberal.
The word liberal has altered so much over the past, just past couple of hundred years, what we talk about in terms of science.
Science being sort of empirical, objective, scientific method.
And now we have the social sciences, which seem to be somewhat language-based with the goal of political activism.
So even the word science has radically altered sanity, conformity, individualism, the state.
You know, you've pointed out in conversations, the state is an agency of coercion.
And then other people say, well, it's an expression of our collective will and so on.
And we have so many definitions.
Looking at a word is kind of like looking at a fly's eye and trying to find one eye.
And so we have this etymology when it comes to language.
But when it comes to ethics, to justifications, to like the big concepts, we somehow think that they're eternal, even though we know they've been overturned many times.
Yes, exactly. Yeah, words change, languages change.
So, you know, people often say to me, oh, you're a postmodernist and a relativist.
Well, then you're a nihilist.
And so when you go get into an airplane, do you think it's, what, not going to fly?
Like, what does that mean? And I say, no, no, no, I'm operating within a particular context of my choosing, which is this particular culture, this particular time.
And we have general agreement on what things are.
We have an agreement on a whole broad array of interpretations of things, ideas, concepts.
So yeah, I think that that's an airplane and I'm going to fly to New York and I'm going to be in New York the next day.
But I'm just saying there are other ways of interpreting anything.
That's all. There are particular rules in this moment.
So when a social justice warrior on a college campus says, and this happens all the time, as you know, the Ku Klux Klan is on this campus.
The Ku Klux Klan is on this campus right now.
This is common claim.
I say, show me the evidence.
I sound like a modernist objectivist.
And they can't.
Now, I think, in their own mind, there is a Ku Klux Klan on the campus, and I'm not going to tell them they're wrong about that, but I am going to say this, that according to the rules of the game that we are operating within right now in this culture, you are wrong.
My work, my historical work, if you read any of my books, my articles, I am a complete modernist, objectivist, totally playing the games of social scientific method.
I use evidence and reason and logic, and that's what I do.
I just try to win that game.
What I do not ever say is that I am writing the truth.
Because I also know, and if you're a historian, you know this, right?
Constantly debating about what happened in the past.
They have exactly the same set of evidence, and they look at the same set of evidence, and they write 57 different books with 57 different interpretations about that thing.
Was Lincoln a murderer?
Was Lincoln a liberator?
Did Lincoln free the slaves?
Was Lincoln a racist? What was the cause of World War I? Still nobody knows.
Yeah, so I don't know.
I could be wrong. And what I am saying postmodernism is, or at least what Foucault and Verrida were or are, they were simply skeptics and agnostics.
Agnostics and skeptics.
And that's, I think, a very, very healthy orientation to have.
All right. So here's where I think I want to start drilling into some of the greater details, because this is to me where things get really, really interesting and where we can, I think, get some good positive friction going.
So you say that you're sort of in, when you say objectivist, I assume you don't mean sort of the Randian, but just into sort of objective reality and so on.
But then you say it's like it's a game and it's a cultural thing, right?
So I don't know if you saw this some months ago.
That there was a report on a campus that there was a KKK guy in a building and it turned out to be a sort of peaked hat that was over a microscope.
Now, from the way that I sort of work philosophically, saying that there's a KKK member in the building, a KKK guy in the building, you're actually saying my perception is that there's a KKK. Like, you're drawing a conclusion based on the sense data coming in through your eyeballs that there's a peaked hat in the building, building and then you are coming up with the conclusion, which is testable, whether there's a KKK.
When you go in and it turns out that it's the cover for a microscope, then your supposition has turned out to be incorrect.
Your conclusion, you know, like when you're in the desert, you sort of, you see some sort of lake in the distance and you, you go, oh, that's a lake.
You run up and you dive in, the lake vanishes.
Well, you were incorrect.
You were getting the right signals from your eyes because the eyes don't say lake.
The eyes just say, this is what's coming in through the eyeballs.
But if you go up there and you swim and you drink and you catch a fish, Gollum style and all that, then to say, I think it's still a mirage when you have all the evidence of your senses starts to become somewhat silly.
So, I think, you know, the plane flying, this is outside our mind, this is outside our subjective experience, and it's not a game or a cultural game in the way that the definition of insanity is.
To me, there's very much a difference between those two situations.
Yeah, I don't.
So the plane, I mean, you know I don't.
The plane or the, what was it, a white sheet over a chair instead of a Klansman's hood or whatever it was.
I think you say in your new book that those things can be interpreted in many or infinite ways.
Is that right? Well, ask me to quote back on my own book.
If you don't have the quote, let's just leave it to one side.
I don't think that things can be interpreted in infinite ways.
I also don't believe that when you're making a statement about reality external to the brain, that...
The relationship between your statement and what you're saying is purely recreational or subjective.
That if you're trying to use language to describe things in the real world, you can be correct or incorrect.
And just starting at the very level of base sense data, empirical evidence.
Is that a tree or is that a building?
Well, you're going to be correct or incorrect based upon what it actually is that you can measure in the world.
Yeah. So this has to do with values.
And so the students' values in this case, in your case here...
They're not my values, okay?
But this is, I imagine, what their values were.
Even if it's not a Klansman's hood, it was still white supremacy because someone allowed something to exist on that campus that would remind a student of color of the Ku Klux Klan that they weren't sufficiently vigilant to not allow something like that to happen to me.
Now, my values say, kid, get over it.
That's not a threat to you.
There is no violence to you.
And if you're going to function and do well and get something from this experience in college, you're going to need to deal with stuff like that and a lot worse.
And so get over it and go study.
Okay? But I'm also not going to say that they are It's not true that they are incorrect in their own valuation.
No, no, no, but I'm not talking about values.
This is sort of identification of objective things in the world, right?
So if I look at a tree and I say, that's a building, or if I look at a building and say, that's a cloud...
I am incorrect in my assessment.
I'm not having any value judgments about it.
I'm not saying that the cloud is racist or anything like that.
I'm just saying a building and a cloud are two separate things.
And if I use the wrong words to describe the entity outside my consciousness, then the relationship between my language and the thing outside my consciousness is incorrect.
No, I think it does have a lot to do with values.
So the plane, I choose.
I choose. I don't think it's correct.
I choose to fly to New York.
I choose to be in New York tomorrow.
Now, if that's my value within this culture, within this context, the only interpretation of the physical world that will deliver that to me Is to think that that thing, that shiny object, that big shiny object on that runway over there is a plane, and it'll take me there.
So that values do determine this.
Wait, sorry. I'm sorry to interrupt.
I just want to make sure I sort of follow the thread.
So you have a personal desire to go to New York tomorrow, let's say, which is, of course, somewhat subjective.
And now you're saying that your belief in the airplane and the laws of physics are equivalent to your subjective preference to be in New York.
In other words, let's say that something else comes up and you say, oh, you know, a family member is sick or my son needs help or something, so I'm not going to go to New York.
You can change that. But you can't change the laws of physics in the same way that you can change your desire to go to New York.
Yeah, I'm choosing to abide by the laws of physics all the time.
But you can't choose to not abide by the laws of physics.
Well, so what I'm saying is the laws of physics change all the time.
I mean, no, no, no, they do.
They get revised. I mean, just recently, as you know, I think, they just discovered how gravity is operating differently in outer space than they previously thought.
No, no, no, no. The laws of physics and our description of the laws of physics are not the same thing.
The laws of physics are our descriptions of what's actually happening in the world.
And as we get new information, right, this is sort of the bleeding edge of human knowledge where there is, of course, a lot of new information coming up and so on.
But the laws of physics aren't changing.
In other words, I can't define a law of physics that makes leaves fall upwards in the fall, right, or water to flow uphill, right?
I mean, whatever happens in the real world, we continually adapt our theories to Our descriptions, but the laws of physics external to our consciousness don't change, it's just that our descriptions get more refined as we get more information.
Leaves fall down? Yes.
They fall downward, really?
So, I mean, if you look at the earth, it's more or less a circle, right?
So, if there's a tree on the top of it, then yeah, maybe the leaves fall down, but is that the only way to view the earth?
Go on. I mean, we can redefine and say, well, leaves fall to the center of mass in the earth or whatever, you know, they fall.
But I mean, just sort of this sort of prosaic, working class, walking through the woods, watching the leaves fall down.
I think we could stay at that level, that they're not going to fall up, let's put it that way, unless there's some massive wind which changes the friction.
But do you see what I mean? Like even the language we use there, it's actually not so clear.
And so when I present this to my students and I literally draw the earth, the circle, and I say, which way is my pen?
I drop a pen and I say, which way is my pen falling?
I say, down. And then I say, really?
And they look at the circle and they say, oh, yeah, I guess it's all relative.
No, no, no. It's not all relative because it's never going to fall up.
It's never going to fall away from the earth.
Well, so again, you know, these ideas change.
This is Foucault's great insight, that they've changed historically, even stuff like that.
Wait, are you saying at some point, sorry to interrupt, but are you saying that at some point things fell away from the Earth?
I'm saying that not very long ago, it was a scientific consensus.
It was common sense that the sun revolved around the Earth.
And if you said anything otherwise, if you even asked a question about it, you were called a heretic or insane, and you were thrown in a dungeon or you were ostracized, right?
And they said, look, use the scientific method, you idiot.
The sun goes from here over us to there every day, and we've watched this every day, and we've recorded this every single day.
It's obvious and common sense that the sun revolves around the Earth.
And then Copernicus and Galileo came along and they said, you heretic, go away, banish you, blah, blah, blah.
So, yeah, right now I'm operating as if the law of gravity that you're describing Yes, I think that I operate in this world as if, yes, things go downward when I drop them, okay?
But nothing, sorry, hang on a sec.
So first of all, the methodology that was being used to establish that the Earth was fixed was not science.
This was not in general science, because, you know, the Bible saying that the Earth is fixed and does not move, and of course the religiosity of the time, We're good to go.
So if you have the wrong methodology, you're going to come to the wrong conclusions.
But nothing changed in the empirical sense from shifting the Earth to the Sun as the center of the solar system.
I mean, certainly it was easier to figure out where Mars was because you could figure out the retrograde motion and so on, and you got to get rid of...
The Ptolemaic system was sort of overlapping circles.
But nothing changed in an empirical level.
I mean, nothing changed sort of when now leaves are falling up or water flows uphill or, you know, whatever, clouds fall down like giant beef cattle from the sky or something.
And so the sort of empirical moment-to-moment experience of the world did not change.
The laws of physics did not change, but human beings' understanding, by beginning to use science rather than theology to understand the world, Our concepts began to become more in line with the objective operations of the mechanistic universe.
Yeah, so they, well, as I understand it, in the 1530s and 40s, they actually did use the scientific method, as I just said.
They used observation, they recorded their observations, they made calculations based on it.
They said that the sun was there at this time this day and that time the other day and, you know, it goes over us and therefore it revolves around the Earth.
There were astronomers who were using the scientific method in the 1530s and they said, Galileo, you're crazy.
Yes, I understand there was also a religious interpretation based on...
It was a barrier, for sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But there were also people using the scientific method to buttress the religious claim.
Newton's theory of gravity, you know, if you look at the whole span of human history, how many thousands of years have there been, you know, human beings, the homo sapiens, it has existed for about, what, 0.001% of human history now.
When, before Copernicus and Galileo came along, we were all sure, totally sure, that the Sun revolves around the Earth.
Now, in this little brief blip of human history, we are totally sure that Newton's theory of gravity is correct.
Seems to me to be arrogant.
I don't know. I know! Where do you get that people are totally sure?
I mean, science is a constant quest of, you know, well, this is conditional until there's new data.
Now, as you point out, I haven't established this.
I'm sure you're absolutely right.
That is that, you know, they're looking at stuff happening, right?
You know, distant galaxies and so on.
And there's behavior that they're getting through telescopes that does not accord with current systems of gravity.
I don't think that scientists say, well, we're completely and totally sure this will never ever...
I mean, I'm sure there are a few, but that seems a very theocratic approach.
We're now omniscient because this newest wave has taken us one centimeter further up the beach of knowledge.
But science to me seems to constant saying, well, whenever empirical evidence is going to contradict the theory, we revise the theory.
We don't throw out the evidence.
I think I agree with everything you just said there.
For the most part, a friend of mine who studied in graduate school in biochemistry said that Any real scientist is a post-modernist, because of what you just said, that to ever say that something is just true is anti-science.
This whole thing about, well, climate change, it's just settled science, is authoritarian, and what you said, theocratic, right?
It's anti-science, it's anti-intellectual, it's authoritarian, and it's religious thinking.
So if we've never arrived at something, if you agree with this, I think you do, that we are sure is eternally true, Then how do we know there is some eternally true reality out there?
Oh, sorry, just a sec. I just got a note from Mike that my camera went blurry.
The force of my rhetoric is warping space-time around my webcam.
Yeah, you're a little fuzzy.
Yeah, all right. Hang on a sec.
Sorry, just your face is fuzzy.
No, it's my youth dial down.
Not your ideas. Why the hell would my focus go to 120?
All right, let me just dial this back a little here.
40 is generally better.
Is that better? Yeah, for me it is, yeah.
Okay, good. So when someone has a really good point, I hit the blur cam to throw them off their stride.
It's beautiful. It's a cheap, sofistic trip.
All right, okay. I turned off the autofocus, so that should be all right.
Now, this, to me, is really fascinating.
And I go back and forth on this.
So, you know, obviously, it's not subtle science for me either.
But, you know, the sort of the guard of the gaps, right?
Which is to say that, well, evolution must be false because we don't have, you know, a continual progress from one species to another and so on.
And then you find some intermediate species and say, well, but, you know, there's still a gap and so on.
This issue where we say...
That relativism or subjectivism is right at the foaming edge of human knowledge.
They didn't know why volcanoes happened.
They didn't know why storms happened.
It's the storm gods.
They're angry and so on.
And then when that gets explained, the justification for some sort of religious approach to the world then moves on to some other slightly further thing.
And when that's explained, now we know Aristotle went mental trying to figure out how the tides worked.
He never imagined That the moon would have anything to do with it so damn far away.
So people would say, well, the tides, that's Poseidon's breathing, whatever they said, right?
And then you have an explanation. My concern is that science, of course, has explained and verified a huge amount of our mere sensory experience.
If you have to go to relativism, which used to occur very locally, right?
If you have to go to justify relativism to stuff that's happening at the edge of human knowledge, at the edge of the known universe...
It seems indistinguishable to me from somebody who has a standard called omniscience for human knowledge.
We'll be certain if we're omniscient.
You set up a standard called basically God, right?
Omniscience. And then say, well, if we fall short of omniscience, we have no certainty at all.
And that seems like a fallacy to me.
Yeah, I'm not sure I followed you, but the – I guess – so what I'm really interested in is – An orientation or an attitude toward these ideas.
And so to me, what scientists do, I think, is they act as agnostics, as I said.
So I used to say, there is no reality.
That's kind of an atheist position.
I've moved from that.
I think that doesn't make sense either.
That's an absolute claim. That's actually a universalist absolute claim.
There might be an objective reality outside of us, but as I just said to you, it's never been shown.
It's never been proven to me.
I've never seen anything that hasn't been revised.
There is no truth claimed by any scientist that's not been revised.
They're constantly working as we speak.
They're working on the theory of gravity.
They're testing it. They're working on all these things that we take for granted now, right?
So until the day I see God, God, or something that is eternal, Proven to be eternal and absolute and universal.
I'm just going to be an agnostic.
This is not anti-science.
This is pro-science. I'm all for it because I like planes.
I just don't think that's the only way to interpret that thing, but I do interpret it that way because that's my value.
Now I say, go ahead, please make a better plane, a faster plane, a more comfortable plane.
Go, go, go. Keep exploring, keep looking, keep thinking, keep theorizing, but it's all possibly Quite possibly.
Or just not true.
Not true. Do you think, have you ever heard of a scientific theory?
I have a pair of glasses here, right? So, they fall down and drop them.
Have you ever heard of a scientific theory that would overturn that basic empirical evidence?
That is universal, common, across, has never been countenanced, has never been contradicted, there's no recorded evidence of glasses falling upwards when you drop them and so on, or away from the center of gravity.
Can you think of a scientific theory that would oppose base sense experience?
Or have you ever heard of such a thing?
That it's opposed the theory of gravity?
No, so the glasses drop, right?
Pick them up, throw them away, gravity overtakes them.
Can you think of a scientific theory that would oppose that basic sense data of things going up or down, falling down when you drop them?
Well, so as I said, they fall upward if you are looking at it from a different perspective.
So that's one thing. No, but towards the center of gravity, let's say.
Yeah, I mean, no, I don't know.
I mean, I'm not a scientist, but, you know, I am not aware, but I'm saying that, again, this is scientific consensus.
I grant you that, for sure. This is scientific consensus, although even there, they're kind of revising it a little bit.
They're not overthrowing the whole thing, by the way, this thing about outer space and things moving differently than they think.
They're not overturning all of the theory of gravity.
They're not saying that matter repels matter now, right?
The sort of brief example, which I'll just touch on here, is the difference between Newtonian physics and Einsteinian physics.
Newtonian physics blurs out and gets less precise and less accurate at, you know, close to the speed of light and all kinds of things, right?
It's still perfectly fine for sailing a vessel from Portugal to America.
You know, you're going to miss by 0.001 degrees.
It's not going to have any appreciable effect.
But, of course, if you're sending a probe to Jupiter, you want to kind of toss the mechanics and mathematics of Newtonian physics in exchange for Einsteinian physics.
But neither of them contradict our base universal experience of gravity, of inertia, of mass, and so on.
And so when you say, well, there's refinements in science, there certainly are.
And science is not relativistic insofar as it overturns itself, but it overturns itself according to Well, first of all, it never overturns base immediate sense data, right?
If you go to a scientific conference and you say, well, my theory of gravity means that these glasses will fall upwards, like they'll never let you in the door, right?
Because it's overturning.
You're attempting to overturn base sense data.
That's number one. And number two, it never completely repudiates prior accurate theories.
It merely refines prior accurate theories according to new data.
Like one of the reasons why the sun was moved to the center of the solar system was the invention of the telescope allowed people to track planets and other things more accurately.
And the increasing complexity with, you know, Occam's razor, the increasing complexity of all these circles within circles to figure out where Mars was was kind of So the fact that science refines itself according to an objective universal methodology, that is the key, right? So the content of science refines, but the scientific method is not overturned for things like, you know, revelation or reading chicken bones or, you know, what your gut tells you or these kinds of things.
Well, so sense data said that the Sun revolves around the Earth, as I said before, right?
No, no, no, no, no. That was a conclusion.
Sense data simply gave you the position of the Sun relative to you.
It was a conclusion to say that means the Sun revolves around the Earth.
That is different from sense data.
Okay. I mean, my sense data says the Earth is flat because I can only see to that far.
No, your sense data says the world looks flat.
Your sense data says that the Sun and the Moon are the same size, but the conclusion that they are in fact the same size is false, right?
So sense data is different from the conclusions.
It's like the sense data that says, there's a mirage, it's really a lake over there in the desert, right?
But that's a conclusion that you're coming to based upon, you know, the light being reflected across different heated layers of air.
So the conclusion is different from the sense data.
Yeah, so the church drew one conclusion from that sense data, and Copernicus drew another conclusion from that sense data.
He didn't work with telescopes, by the way.
All he had was his eyeballs.
Galileo had the telescopes. But Copernicus just said, you know what?
Maybe there's a different way of thinking about this.
He was an agnostic. He was an agnostic.
He said, maybe there's just a different way of thinking about this.
Here's an idea. What do you think?
Heretic. Yeah, no, I don't quite get that.
It was more accurate to say that the Sun is the center of the solar system.
And I know the word center and these things.
And of course, the Sun also revolves a little bit around the Earth and all that kind of stuff.
But in terms of the Earth being fixed and flat at the center of the universe, that is incorrect relative to the sun being the center of the solar system.
It was a false supposition.
And this is where I guess I'm a little bit concerned where you say there's no such thing as truth.
Because certainly if there's no difference between the Earth being the center of the solar system and the sun being the center of the solar system, I can understand the perspective.
But the sun is, in fact, the center of the solar system.
So it's a more accurate representation.
Would you like scientists to stop studying that?
Thank you.
Thank you.
Would I like scientists to stop?
It's the question, would I like scientists to invest a lot of time and energy into the flat earth theory?
Anything. I mean, you name it.
Pick a truth claim. Is there a truth claim you would like us to stop investigating?
Well, sure, of course.
Which one? Well, I mean, it's an almost infinite number of them.
Are there invisible unicorns dancing on my head right now?
You know, is the world banana shaped?
Is the universe 12 seconds old, right?
I mean, there's some because, you know, it's opportunity cost, right?
Life is short, we should focus our attentions on the most valuable things we can do, which is, I guess, flattering, because we're both involved in this debate, right?
So given that time is short and given that everything is an opportunity cost and we don't have infinite numbers of scientists to devote to infinite numbers of causes, sure, I want scientists to have nothing to do with state power.
I want scientists to respond to free exchange of values in the market.
I want scientists to deliver to consumers that which is most valuable to consumers.
But as far as other things that I think are pretty useless for scientists to do, Absolutely.
All you have to do is look through government budgets at things that scientists study and say, well, I can think of a better use for that half million dollars.
Sure. Like, if I had a hundred bucks, I would not give it to unicorn research.
But scientists also haven't spent any time on studying unicorns.
What they have spent a lot of time on is studying the solar system and how the sun and the earth relate to one another.
And so the heliocentric theory...
It has been studied constantly since Copernicus brought it up, and I would like for them to continue studying that.
I think that's a reasonable thing to do.
In a sort of free society, you could fund that, and other people who don't want to wouldn't, and they would have to respond to those market forces.
As you pointed out earlier with this sort of knowledge problem, which is something that is a fantastic thought, I have no idea what scientists should study or should not study.
I'm not a scientist. And of course, I don't know where all this stuff leads.
You know, some guy studying something really esoteric could end up with the long-promised jetpack that I'm still dying to get ever since I read about them as a kid, or time travel, I don't know, whatever, right?
And so I don't know.
What should be? And of course, governments don't know and scientific bodies don't know and nobody knows.
And this is why the free market should determine all of these things.
So, you know, if you say to me, what should scientists study or not?
I have my own particular preferences, but fundamentally, I don't know.
I think most importantly, I'd like to buy the products of science that are good and useful to the world.
I'd also like scientists to study, you know, how to reduce pollution around the world.
Like 15 times more people die from pollution than from violence.
Sure. So I'm just saying, you know, is there a science that is settled?
The scientific method is settled.
No, that's important. It's sort of like saying, are all of your arguments going to be logical?
Well, no, of course not, right?
But if you are accepting of logic as the methodology for resolving disagreements like reason and evidence, that is something you don't overturn.
And again, science overturns its own...
Conclusions, but it does not overturn the scientific method.
Like, we're not going to return to prayer for the most part.
We're not going to return to prayer or the consensus of the papal agencies to figure out what is good or valid science.
That's not going to happen unless there's some dark age, in which case that's the least of our worries.
Well, I mean, so it's Thomas Kuhn, who wrote basically in some ways the first postmodernist book, The Structures of Scientific Revolutions, published in the early 1960s.
Everyone should read this. And this is where I'm getting a lot of my stuff on Copernicus, by the way.
He's the first one to point this out.
He just simply said, hey, look, science is constantly changing its mind.
Therefore, it seems to me they've never proven that anything is settled.
And therefore, we haven't proven that there's any absolute universal truth.
Outside of us, there might be.
Again, there might be.
So I'm an agnostic. I'm an agnostic on this.
What Thomas Kuhn called the Copernican Revolution was a change in the paradigm.
It was paradigmatic change.
It was revolutionary. The whole paradigm of science changed because of that.
So that was an overthrow of the way things were done.
Maybe not entirely. As I said, they used observation and reporting about- But according to reason and evidence.
Sure. Right, so the reason and evidence is not overthrown.
Yeah, well, partly, but it is also influenced, of course, by the culture, very much so, which, you know, there was the church saying, oh, no, we are the center of the universe because God said so, right?
And so that's what scientists brought to their scientific endeavor, right?
As all scientists do, I think you agree with that.
Is there not some sort of cultural concept?
Well, sorry to interrupt, but the idea that the circle was more perfect than an ellipse, and therefore there couldn't be elliptical orbits, because God liked circles, because they were more perfect mathematically and so on, which is, again, one of the drivers behind the Ptolemaic system.
But that was coming in with an incorrect methodology, which was that there are certain things that God wants, and that's how the universe must operate, which turned out it's anti-scientific, it's anti- Empirical and not open-minded, right?
So I guess my concern is if you're looking at the content Well, sure, that's going to change, right?
I mean, you're going to go from Newtonian to Einsteinian.
There's going to be this weird superstring thing that seems to go on forever and ever.
There's quantum physics and so on.
And so there's going to be these constant changes in terms.
But there's two things that don't happen, right?
There's two things where we can find certainty.
Number one, scientific theories cannot overturn base sense experience.
They are false by definition if they overturn base sense experience.
So that's number one. And number two, the scientific method.
Is not overturned by science, any more than mathematical logic is overturned by math.
Well, okay. I mean, I'm still struggling with the base sense point.
I mean, so we receive data, I guess, you know, points of light through eyeballs, sense data, which is disorganized or unorganized.
It's unorganized, right, when it comes in.
What do you mean by unorganized?
Well, I mean, in the baby, in the infant, right?
They see the thing, which makes no sense to them.
There is no, they see the toy hanging from the ceiling.
That's not a toy hanging from the ceiling.
It's just the data.
It's just the sensory. Well, I don't know how much babies, I mean, you're a father, I'm a father.
They seem to figure things out pretty quickly.
But let's say that they're born with a blur of chaos at birth, sure.
I mean, they don't know that you're its father.
When they first see you.
Well, mine does, because I read in the womb and all of that.
No, I read to her in the womb, and there's studies that they recognize and respond to the parent's voice.
So, sure. I mean, if you give them enough pre-birth sense data, so to speak, which in general is sound, then they can recognize you from birth.
Oh, okay. I've never heard of that.
That seems amazing to me, that they know that this is my father and not the guy standing next to him who's my friend.
I don't know. Right when he came out of the womb and he was staring at me, I had this experience.
Again, if they've been imprinted, they can hear sounds from within the womb and they're very sensitive to the timber of a voice.
This doesn't overturn anything you're saying fundamentally.
I just want to do a little point of fact here.
And I will grant you something, too.
I will say, if that's possible, I don't know, but certainly that's possible.
I would say it's certainly possible, then, that the sounds out of my voice are familiar.
It's not a new sound to the child, to the infant.
I would grant that. And they wouldn't know the concept of father or insemination or anything like that?
That's it. Sure. That's it.
So the father, father, that's a category that we've created, isn't it?
Well, no, it's not a category we've created.
I mean, it is a biological genetic relationship based upon insemination.
So, but what does it mean to be a father?
It's a little more complicated than that.
In our culture? No, no, no, no.
Hang on, hang on. You can't switch from biology to culture as if there's no change whatsoever.
Being a father means different things in different cultures.
So, in some cultures, being a father means being present and sacrificing material wealth.
Other cultures and other circumstances, it is material wealth that you provide, even if it means you're not spending time with your children and so on.
But just in terms of the basic biological relationship, if you've contributed 50% of the baby's genetics through your sperm, that makes you the biological father.
The parenting issue in terms of how you parent, what you parent, what values you are, and so on, sure, there's a lot of culture, but I wouldn't want to conflate the two.
Yeah, so I'm pretty sure that my infant son and your infant daughter did not know that we were their progenitors.
No, I'm pretty sure of that.
Yeah, I agree. Okay.
So, right. So that was my point.
But nonetheless, the points of light from bouncing off of us into them, into their eyeballs, it's in there.
It's data, I suppose, points of light.
But it's unorganized, right?
And eventually, we organize it by saying, da-da.
Da-da? Dada.
Say it with dada. And finally they say dada and then we start talking more about what dada does and how dada and they start seeing observing dada operating in particular ways and then they start hearing the word father and they notice that there are other fathers doing sort of similar things and we hear people talking about fathers and then all of a sudden we have this category of father in our head to draw lines around those points of light that came into us as infants that is a father.
Okay, so that's what I'm saying is subjective.
That is subjective.
The lines we draw, the descriptions, we draw lines around the points of light and make those things into categories, and then we use those categories, and then if there is broad agreement about those categories, this is a father, that's a tree, that's a car, that's an airplane, that general set of agreements is what I call a culture.
So are you saying that a child who says data to a tree, that could be perfectly correct in a cultural context?
Sure. So the tree could have inseminated the mother and created a half-ent baby?
Is that the theory?
In the mind of the child, yeah.
No, no, no. In the mind of the child.
In reality, is it physically possible for a tree to impregnate a woman?
I can't believe the sentences I say sometimes.
I just want to point this out. But in sort of biological reality, is it possible for a tree to impregnate a woman and create a half-tree baby?
According to our culture, no.
No, no, no. According to biology, not culture.
I'm just fleshing this out here.
According to our culture, absolutely not.
According to the way I live my life, absolutely not.
But the idea in that child or person is not incorrect in an absolute sense.
There's nothing incorrect.
That is simply an interpretation that differs from the culture's interpretation.
That's all. Okay, let me ask you this.
Because I mean, to me, the idea that the tree could be a father, and that somehow you can make this...
I mean, people could believe that, but they're wrong.
Biologically, physically, evolutionarily, there's no possible way for a tree to inseminate a human female.
They are wrong according to this blip of a moment in history in this particular place.
Yes, the culture that you and I live in, which is a very, very tiny part of human existence, historically, they're totally wrong.
But as you know, most people who have ever lived have ideas sort of similar to that, that people come from all kinds of places, rocks and trees and rivers and God and Animals and all kinds of ideas that cultures have believed in.
And they're the majority, Stefan.
We're the minority. We're the weirdos.
So we could be right, but it seems somewhat arrogant to me to know that we are for sure right and always will be right.
So it seems arrogant to say that a tree can't father a human baby.
We could be wrong.
So a tree could father a human baby.
I don't know. I'm saying the sun traveled around the earth and everybody believed that.
And now we think that is utterly ridiculous and stupid.
All right. How about two and two make four?
Again, so mathematics is a system.
It's a language. It's a language, isn't it?
It's a descriptive language.
And it has a beginning and an end.
It's a closed system.
It's a great system. It's given us lots of stuff like airplanes that I like to fly in.
So I'm all for it.
And I want people to do mathematics.
I'm bad at it. So I want other people to do a lot of it and to make stuff.
Make stuff for me that I like.
And I tell you what I like.
I can give you a long list. All subjective.
All my own value.
Nothing universal about that.
But I know that mathematics delivers good things, things that I like, to me.
Sorry. No problem. That doesn't mean that it is some sort of absolute, you know, it's not given to us by God, I don't think, mathematics.
No, it's not. Nor is it given to us by nature, is it?
Yes, it is. I don't see the words two or two or four in any leaf or blade of grass anywhere.
Ah, now here we get to some really juicy stuff, which is the relationship between concepts and entities, right?
So if you have four coconuts sitting on a table, that's two coconuts and two coconuts.
Four, as you know, it's a synonym for two, right?
Two and two, right? Two and two make four.
Four is just another way of saying two and two.
Basically, it's kind of like a tautology, but you've got to split it up.
There is a tautology.
That's my point here. And so if you're saying that two and two make four and you've got four coconuts on a table, if you're saying two and two make five, well, you can count two coconuts, you can count two coconuts, and then you can count one, two, three, four, and find out if two and two make four.
This exists outside of a cultural context.
And the reason we know that, I think, It's not only because it's empirical and objective, but also because if everything was cultural, then it meant that there were no essences before there were human beings.
There was nothing that existed that had any universal or permanent nature or structure before there were human beings.
But, of course, if there was no universal objective nature and structure of the universe, if there were no laws of physics, if there were no laws of biology, if there were no patterns of evolution, human beings could never have evolved to begin with.
So the idea that we come along and now everything becomes subjective when objectivity was required for us to come along at all is kind of like shooting your dad and saying you're Jesus.
Yeah. So can you prove objective reality?
Any instance of objective reality?
Can you prove it? I can prove that you rely upon it to have this conversation.
I mean, let me ask you this.
Do you think that I exist in objective reality?
Ha! So, let's see.
My base senses?
What is that? Tell me that you and I are sitting in the same room having a conversation across this table.
It's only my mind.
Wait, you don't know the difference between a screen and a person?
Do you think if you're watching pornography, do you think you're having an orgy?
I mean, how vivid? What kind of TV do you have?
I want that TV. That's a big TV. It's very vivid.
If I didn't have a subjective mind and a culture to live in that tells me differently, knowing that this thing I'm looking at is actually a computer and that it actually broadcasts an image of your face and you're in Toronto or wherever you are, Yeah, how else would I know?
So a two-year-old would think you're sitting in the same room.
But if you have to justify your perspectives by appealing to the edge of the universe, the limits of known physics and a two-year-old, do you think that you might be reaching a little bit to keep your subjectivity?
Well, you know, somebody who's brain dead.
I was like, well, but that's, you know, somebody who's too a newborn baby and so on.
My question is, and this is like, I mean, I appreciate and I really respect your commitment to this, right?
So if you can look at me and say, Steph, I don't think that you exist.
I have no proof that you exist. I don't believe that you exist.
In objective reality, that's committed.
I appreciate that. No, no.
I obviously operate as if you do exist.
That's how I live my life, generally speaking, but I simply remain agnostic.
There could be some other thing happening.
I don't know. That's all.
How would you know?
What is the standard by which you would know one way or the other?
Let me make it clear here. I don't spend a whole lot of time on that.
I don't walk around thinking, gee, is the person at the post office really here?
I think so. I think you do, because this is the postmodern stuff.
This is the cultural stuff. There's no difference between cultural subjectivity and scientific objectivity.
You may not in your mind, I think, and I'm not presuming to tell you how you think, it just sort of seems to be phallologically, that if you are a radical relativist, that this is in your mind to one degree or another, because when it comes up, this is what you say.
And I would assume that you have the integrity to live according to your values.
Sure. So, God.
Same thing. I have the same attitude toward God.
I don't know. Maybe there's a God.
As me? Oh, yeah, maybe.
No, whatever. A God. No, what I mean is, so you have, your agnostic has to mind.
I'm sorry to interrupt, and I'm not trying to be nasty.
I really want to understand this.
You are as agnostic to the existence of God as you are to the existence of me.
More or less, I mean, yes, objective reality, yes.
Yes, I'm agnostic toward both.
So, which means, again, I don't spend much time thinking about the existence of God in my life, okay?
But when asked, or when I occasionally do think about it, I think, well, maybe there is.
Maybe God did create those clouds in this earth and this building and whatever.
But I just hold out a little bit of skepticism about everything.
Isn't that what we should do as scientists, as libertarians, as people interested in individual freedom, as intellectuals?
I mean, to me, it's anti-intellectual to make an absolute truth claim about anything.
So, it is always wrong, always false, to make a universal truth claim?
No, no, no. I've said this...
Ten times now and you're mishearing me.
Or something. I said agnostic.
I'm not saying there is no truth and there is no God.
I'm saying I don't know.
So anyone who says that there is a truth is incorrect?
No. Well, I mean, I'm saying I don't know if they're correct.
And they don't know either.
So that they're incorrect.
I mean, if I'm making a truth claim, which I have no particular right to make, then I may not believe that I'm wrong, but I'm wrong, right?
And you know this. I mean, you've mentioned this in your interviews before, which is, you know, the people who say, it is absolutely true that there's no such thing as absolute truth, right?
And you know that's a logical fail, and it's like the first thing that every undergraduate presents you with, and what's your response to that?
Yeah, I reject that now. I used to sort of make that claim.
I don't even think I did, but I certainly reject that now.
As I said, that's an atheist position.
I am definitely an agnostic on this.
An agnostic on everything.
Again, as an intellectual, intellectual should know this and they should embrace this above all else.
I mean, any truth claim is a stop on the conversation.
It's saying that this is settled and stop asking questions about it.
But what's wrong with having something be settled?
I mean, clearly, you do have to have things.
This is not a moral argument or an intel.
This is just a sort of practical argument.
We do have to settle certain things.
We don't want to spend the rest of our lives learning how to walk.
We want to run. We want to play sports.
We want to do martial arts and so on.
I'm not sure what's wrong with having certainties about things so that we can build on those certainties and achieve better things.
things.
Because of course, all the technology we're relying on, the comforts that we enjoy, this very conversation that we have, rely upon the suspension of disbelief about subjectivism, right?
You know, there's no way that people would develop computers or bridges or cars or whatever if they were radical subjectivists, so to speak, right?
And so given that we rely on all of these things to have these conversations, given that you must assume that I exist in order to have a conversation with me.
Because, you know, if I was sitting here with a hand puppet, having this debate and really thinking it was you, that would be crazy.
You know, whether Foucault would agree with me or not, that would be not a sign of So if you have to assume objective reality exists, if you have to assume that other people exist...
And if everyone who provides us the technology and tools to do this has to assume and accept objective reality, empirical facts, scientific truths, and so on, it just seems kind of, I mean, it's kind of a goofy way to put it, but it just seems kind of stingy and ungrateful to say, well, I have to accept all of these truths and realities in order to function in the world and have conversations and get to New York and pick up my son at the right time and so on.
But I'm still going to withhold acceptance of them.
I mean, compared to what?
I mean, what standard of knowledge would give you any kind of certainty or is that impossible?
Hmm. Wait, why is it stingy?
I just don't get that.
It's sort of like if you rely upon being generous, like if you rely on someone lending you money in order to survive and then you slam generosity, it's just like if you're relying on objective reality to have this conversation and then you claim to be agnostic about objective it's just like if you're relying on objective reality to have this conversation and then you claim to be agnostic about objective reality, it's a withholding that is opposite
Which is assuming that the objective reality exists, that language has some capacity for meaning, that I exist, that the conversation is worth having, that there's value in it, which I really am enjoying and I'm very glad we're having it.
So if you have all of this foundational acceptance and requirement to accept empirical objective reality, the existence of other people, the potential meaningfulness of language and so on, and then you deny all of that while requiring it to have the conversation, it just seems very contradictory.
Not denying it. Not denying it.
It's a mutual association. It's a voluntary agreement.
It's a contract. So you and I agreed to have this interview.
I doubt you said this.
I certainly didn't say it. I'm going to do this interview because it's the right thing to do, the good thing to do.
It's a universally good thing to do this.
It's mutually beneficial, I hope.
At least it is for me. It's, I am agreeing to operate in the world according to the way other people have established the rules in this culture.
And what I'm saying is, maybe we're wrong about some things, right?
So think about all the different cultures in the world that have ever existed, right?
And all the differences between them.
And imagine if everyone just said in those cultures, yes, it is stingy and ungrateful to question the rules of our culture.
Well, that would be a very bad world to live in, wouldn't it?
But you keep conflating culture with reality.
Are you saying that reality, empirical, objective, scientific, sense-data-based reality, the stuff that's outside of our control, like I can't stand out in the sun with no sunscreen and not get a sunburn, like things that are outside of my control, the difference between waking and dreaming life.
In dreams, to some degree, everything, of course, is subjective, and the waking reality is one of the reasons we know the difference.
Are you saying that culture is exactly the same or is in the same category epistemologically as objective empirical reality?
Yes, I'm skeptical about all of its claims.
So if everyone had thought it was stingy and ungrateful to question cultural claims in the 1920s, I would be considered a chimpanzee because I'm half Jewish and half Irish.
And we can go on and on, right?
I mean, all the things that were common sense and just known as objective reality Until about five minutes ago, we now consider to be ridiculous, absurd, and reactionary, and authoritarian.
But of course, it would be objective science that would save you from such an unjust categorization, right?
No, it would be. It would be because now that we have the Human Genome Project and we can actually look at the genetics of humanity, then it would be objective, empirical, scientific, replicatable reality and methodologies that would determine your humanity.
Well, I mean, I think it is totally valid and convincing to me, using scientific method, that the Irish were, in fact, chimpanzees because they acted like a bunch of apes, in fact, in the 19th century.
Oh, yeah. I mean, they were drinking all the time and fornicating all the time and not working ever and playing and dancing all the time.
This is the Irish-Americans when they first came here, notorious for this.
It's all true. Oh, come on, man.
No, no, no. Please. You need to read my book.
No, I mean, look, okay, yes, there was some problematic, I'm half Irish too, right?
So there was some problematic Irish behavior among certain sections of the population.
But there are also, you know, there aren't chimpanzees that produce wonderful works of art and poetry and literature and plays and so on.
And And so on, right?
I mean, yes, there was, of course, problematic behavior, some of it cultural, some of it, of course, probably due to lack of nutrition in child raising and so on.
But the idea that the Irish are like chimpanzees because they got drunk, I mean, this is where we are, that there's no genetic basis for this at this point?
I don't know what to tell you. I'm saying the behavior of the Irish Americans overwhelmingly, not entirely, but overwhelmingly, was nowhere near the standards of white Americans.
And it was nowhere near the standards that white Americans and Americans generally thought that human beings should be displaying.
The geniuses among the Irish would have been called the exceptions.
But this was all used with the scientific method.
They observed behavior like they observed the behavior of animals.
They saw this, that, and the other thing.
They also noticed physical differences, right?
The Irish, you can say, look different, generally speaking, than people in England and Wales.
Much more handsome, of course.
That's the important thing that people need to understand.
But just from my perspective, right?
That's a race.
Sorry, go ahead.
I interrupted you.
Go ahead.
So it is according to science, scientific method, that is a separate and inferior race.
That is a completely reasonable thing to say, a reasonable claim, according to the scientific method.
So the reason it was overturned was for politics, political reasons.
The Irish decided, we don't like being treated like chimpanzees.
We actually want to be citizens of America, so we're going to start becoming cops and firefighters and politicians, and we're going to become racists and hate the blacks, and we're going to stop dancing and stop drinking less, drink less.
We're going to use proper English. I don't think it's particularly productive to say that the Irish are racists.
I mean, come on. What other group would you say that about?
Well, I'm talking about the 19th century Irish in New York and Philadelphia.
It's really hard to argue that Irish, certainly leaders and much of the Irish working class in those cities in the 19th century were not racist.
Read about the draft riots in New York City.
They were lynching blacks in the streets, in part to demonstrate that they were good Americans.
But racist is a negative term, and I don't think you want to categorize an entire group of people negatively in order to complain about them characterizing an entire group of people negatively.
I'm just saying that's what the Irish did to become white.
Okay, that's a bit of a meta thing, so go ahead.
No, no, no, hang on. And so what science did was, it's an amazing thing, so in the 1830s and 40s, you can read the literature on this, they were universally considered by English and American intellectuals and scientists to be either black, by the way, black, negro, or simians, as I said, apes, chimpanzees, whatever. By 1910, they're considered to be Nordics, not just white, but the best whites.
All using the scientific method.
No. I mean, they were using the scientific method.
How on earth could they be using the scientific method?
They didn't have any capacity to map genomes.
Well, I mean, so science said the Irish went from being apes to white people in less than a century.
And what I'm saying is... But that's not...
Hang on. What scientific method were they using?
I mean, just because scientists say something doesn't mean that they're using the scientific method, right?
So what scientific method were they using to change these categorizations?
Because they certainly didn't have access to DNA or genetics.
No, but they had access to things like tests.
So they gave them tests in the public schools, and they found that the Irish scored very low on those tests, measuring what we would now call intelligence.
Well, it was called intelligence then. Now we would call it IQ. They also measured their behaviors.
They found out that high, high percentages of Irish families were full of drunks.
Alcoholism was off the charts among Irish families.
They found that the Irish attitudes, spoken, uttered attitudes about work was not so good.
They didn't like to work. They didn't want to work.
They rejected work. That the number of Irish felons was off the charts.
The prisons were full of Irish people for good reason.
They were mostly criminals.
They were the ones doing the violence in the streets, stabbing people.
Not just blacks, but whites too.
They ran the gangs in New York City, the gangs of New York.
Irish, hello. That is what we do now with social science.
They looked at that. And they said, oh, and also, by the way, they have sort of different kinds of hair, generally speaking, and sort of more pale skin.
And, huh, that's a race.
Treckles and three teeth, if I remember rightly, from the family portraits.
And it's an inferior one.
And then by the 1910s, oh, no, they're great.
They're Nordics. They're the best white people.
Weird. Well...
It's incorrect science, obviously, because genetically...
No, it is. I mean, so they get better tools, like just like you get telescopes and you get more data and you refine yourself.
And now we have a more accurate appreciation that the Irish are not simians.
And I mean, I guess they'd be in the orangutan because of the red hair family.
Which scientific method was employed in the 20th century that wasn't employed in the 19th that would have proven that they were not a different race?
Well, I would assume that the empirical data of their test scores and so on altered to the point where there were improvements in the overall behavior.
Absolutely. Their IQ went up tremendously.
IQ went way up.
And they started doing well in school, and they started getting good grades, and they stopped being criminals as much, and they stopped drinking.
So it's sort of like you, sorry to interrupt, but it's sort of like you would categorize a group of people as pygmies because they were enormously short when it turned out that what happened was they were malnourished, and therefore when they got proper nourishment, you'd say, oh, they're not short, they're now tall, so we're no longer going to classify them as pygmies.
Isn't that sort of following the scientific method, at least to some degree?
Yeah. I suppose.
I'm just saying that you can make up a category if you want to.
So race is an invention, right?
That term, that category, it's an invention.
It's a descriptive invention.
It's fine. But that's what it does.
It describes, it looks at a particular group, categories, right?
And says, oh, that, that's a race.
But we can call it anything else, right?
We don't have to call them that.
We don't have to say that that race is, or we also don't have to say that's superior or inferior.
That's all, of course, subjective.
I certainly agree with that, the idea of superior or inferior races.
I mean, that to me is an entirely anti-scientific argument.
Races evolved according to local conditions and did so magnificently.
And so the idea that there's better or worse or superior or inferior races would go against evolution completely.
Well, so if you value intelligence as the IQ test measures intelligence, No, they were, in fact, inferior.
And, in fact, right now, hold on, right now, African Americans, if you believe that, are, in fact, inferior.
Because it is true that African Americans score lower on IQ tests than white Americans.
Now, the thing is, with IQ, I'm sure you know this, you know, IQ scores have been going up for about a century now across the world among all groups and among all so-called races.
That's a strange thing.
If it's genetic and universal and absolute and there's nothing we can do about it, it's just a biological fact, how in the world are people going to get higher scores over time if it's just biologically determined that they're dumber?
That's number one. Number two is, where do we draw the lines between races?
You know what I mean? Who exactly is Irish?
Am I Irish? You said you're half, and I'm a quarter or a third or something.
But like, what exactly? See, if you weren't Irish, you'd be better at math.
You'd know that number exactly.
I'm just kidding. No, it's true.
Yeah, it's true. And my Jewish part sometimes overrides it so I can do some accounting, but then my Irish part says, no, you can't do it.
I want to get drunk and run Hollywood.
Okay, go on. Yeah, I get drunk and then I feel guilty about it.
That's the Irish. I just stole that joke from someone else.
Anyway, so when I lived in London, I lived in London for a year.
I lived in a neighborhood that was full of Irish people, as many neighborhoods in London are and many neighborhoods in England, as I'm sure you now are.
So, what are they?
What race are they? Are they Irish?
Are they English? Or what is English?
What is Welsh? I'm also part Welsh.
Welsh? English? Where do you draw the line?
Well, you can go, there's a website, you know, 23andMe.
You can go to 23andMe and you can get your exact breakdown of genetic influences in your magical being of oneness.
Yeah, which tells you your national origin, meaning the country, the nation your ancestors were born in.
Okay, is that a race?
Is Welsh a race? Is people born in Wales, that plot of land a race?
Wales, a nation, a country, Which didn't exist before, right?
For a long time, which was, as you know, the history of nationalism.
All these nations were invented out of whole cloth in the 18th and 19th centuries.
All of a sudden, oh, now we're Welsh?
What does that mean? It's a new thing.
Now it's a race? Well, I mean, yeah, I don't know what the exact taxonomy of races are.
But of course, as you know, in the past, people didn't travel a whole lot.
And so there wasn't a lot of sort of localized, quote, inbreeding.
And that will give, I think, certain kinds of...
Genetic specificities. I should know this word.
Certain kind of genetic specifics to particular groups, like, you know, the Tibetans high up in the mountains have over the past couple of thousand years, and some think it's even shorter than that, developed particular genes to help them process rare oxygen more efficiently and so on.
So, I mean, who knows?
I mean, as far as this goes, there is, of course, all of the blurry edges, but...
As science moves forward and as more information comes forward, we can refine these things.
And again, this means in terms of scientific conclusions, we can't say for sure about scientific conclusions.
But I can say, and I sort of return to this point, it can't contradict base sensory data, and we can't use something other than the scientific method to improve scientific conjecture.
Still struggling. And really, it's my fault here.
I'm not understanding it.
Base sensory data.
I'm not sure what you mean by that.
I really just don't. Oh, sure.
No, no problem. Well, it's back to you drop your glasses.
There can't be a scientific theory that says they fall away from the Earth.
But that's a... Well, again, isn't that a conclusion, though?
Not a... You're concluding that they're falling toward the center of the Earth.
I mean, your eyes don't tell you that the Earth is down there.
The center of the Earth is down there.
We don't even know the center of the earth. Well, I mean, it's just because if we use the colloquial falling down, then people can say, well, in Australia, it looks like they're falling.
You know what I mean? So we'll just go to the colloquial.
You can't have a scientific theory that says glasses fall up when you let go of them on the earth.
Because it looks like they fall down?
Because they fall down. And they fall down universally, and they fall down for all time, and there's never recorded instances of them not falling down, and according to science, that is an eternal and absolute truth, that gravity is a property of matter, and it attracts matter.
Okay, so when I said that if you look at the Earth from a different perspective, you agreed that, well, sure, it could be up, but really it's falling toward the center of the Earth.
So your eyes don't say that the center of the earth is down there or that the center of the earth is down.
Yeah, but let me just talk about the direction. Let's just put it this way.
Assuming you're standing on the ground, they fall to your feet.
And they always will. And there's no scientific theory that contradicts that base sensory data.
So there are constraints upon science, right?
Science can't contradict base sense data.
Science is built upon base sense data because we require base sense data to process the empirical evidence, even of scientific outcomes.
Like the old thing to say, well, if you're colorblind, you see gray and I see red.
Well, I mean, that's not a scientific term.
Color wavelength is a scientific term, and a colorblind person and a person who's not colorblind will see the same light as Bouncing off a color and in the wavelength will be the same for both.
So there are ways of making things objective that are subjective, such as sight and so on, you know, like, I mean, as I'm pushing past 50, you know, like, need the old goggles, never needed them before, you know, because objectively, when I look at the...
The letters on the wall of the optometrist, they're blurry, and I put the glasses on, and they're clear.
So there are ways of making things more objective and trying to pull out subjectivity and tease objective principles out of subjectivity, to me, is the role of philosophy, is the role of ethics, which we'll perhaps have to talk about another time.
And also the role of the scientific method.
And we are, of course.
Our brains are entirely subject to misinterpretation, to error, which is why we need objective methodologies like reason and evidence, science, and so on, in order to attempt to gain...
Access to objectivity as opposed to being forever mired in subjectivity.
To me, subjectivity is when you have sort of magical explanations for phenomena, and that stops you from exploring.
If the tsunami came from an angry water god, well, you're never going to think about...
Why it actually came and if the tides were Poseidon breathing, right?
So I think I agree with you.
Doubt and knowing our capacity for error is very important.
But if you're stuck in the category of everything could be error, nothing could be true, then you don't actually have anything to build on and you rely for the comforts in your life and the possibility of success that other people reject your thesis and build things according to objective reality so that you can use them.
Yeah, I think in your book you say that a painting, I think it was a painting you referred to, can be perceived in infinite ways, interpreted in infinite ways.
Well, so...
Then that's sensed data. So we all look at the same object.
No, but a painting can't be interpreted as a cloud.
So you can say, like, if you get some spatter painting, or the Rorschach test, sorry to interrupt, but the Rorschach test, say, what is this?
It's like, that's my mother with a knife, or, you know, whatever it is.
Like, people see it's a butterfly.
People can see it that way.
But you can't look at a Rorschach test and say, that's a roaring fire.
Like, for real, not an image of, like, I'm going to warm my hands, and oh, it's going to burn me.
And I mean, that would be a psychotic delusion to fundamentally misinterpret reality to that degree.
So you can subjectively say, this is what I see in the painting.
But you can't say, the painting is an airplane.
Or the painting is a cloud.
If it's a painting of a cloud, it's not the same as being the cloud.
So you can subjectively interpret your impressions of what you're looking at, but you can't redefine it at whim according to anything in the real world.
So a thousand people look at a cloud, and would you say that one of those people interprets the cloud correctly or more correctly than everyone else?
Well, I mean, if a thousand people look at a cloud and say that's a cloud, I think that they're interpreting it correctly.
How do you know? You see?
It's a closed system. No, it's not a closed system.
Yeah, because we've named those things that look like that a cloud.
Well, the language doesn't particularly matter.
The question is whether you use the French word for cloud or the Zimbabwe word for cloud or the English word for cloud.
It's not particularly important, just as, you know, there's different colors for wavelength in different languages, but the wavelength is objective.
So if somebody says, that cloud...
Is an airplane? Well, there's ways of measuring whether the cloud is an airplane or not.
You could shoot a radar at it, and if the radar goes right through it rather than bouncing back, well, that's one of the characteristics of a cloud rather than an airplane.
So there's ways you could fly up an airplane right next to it.
You could try and fly through it, and if you can fly through it, then it's a cloud, not an airplane.
There's lots of empirical ways to test whether or not it's a cloud, and that's science.
There's empirical ways to test whether it's this thing that we call a cloud.
So it's a tautology, but that's fine.
No, no, no. Empirical verification is not a tautology.
Saying a cloud is a cloud, that's a tautology.
But if you have an empirical methodology for proving, if you have a null hypothesis, right?
Like if it doesn't show up on radar, it's not an airplane, right?
So if it doesn't show up on radar, somebody who says it's an airplane, that's not a tautology because you have an external test To verify whether it's an airplane or a cloud.
That's not tautological because there's an outside methodology for proof or disproof.
The category of a cloud is an invention.
So, planets, right?
When I was a kid and you were a kid, remember?
Pluto was a planet.
I think it was newly bequeathed as a planet then.
I think it dipped out and then it came back.
I mean, to me, it's like a dolphin coming up and out of the ocean.
It's not a planet.
It's a planet. But none of these descriptors changed the physical nature of Pluto at all.
So it was a planet. It was absolutely a planet.
It was in all my books. I was into astronomy when I was a kid.
And, you know, it was right there.
And that's definitely true.
And that's what you do when you teach.
Those are the planets. And that's one of the planets.
And then about, I don't know, five years ago or something, ten years ago, there was an announcement.
Pluto is not a planet.
The particular standards we have of planets.
I think they found new—sorry, I'm really reaching here, but if I remember rightly, because I was an astronomy geek when I was a kid, too, and still love it.
I think what they did was they found similarly sized objects that didn't follow particular planetary patterns or have planetary characteristics, so they had to—well, the technical term in software—deprecate it, so to speak, right?
But none of the labels changed the physical properties.
Like, it wasn't like it got bigger when you used the word planet and then got smaller when you used the term, I don't know, asteroid or planetoid or whatever they're using now.
As I said, I'm all for taxonomy.
I'm all for using categories, right?
All for it. I use them all the time, all day long.
I'm just saying the categories are inventions.
They're useful, often inventions, but they're just inventions, okay?
So what you're saying is that you use empirical data to prove whether something is Part of this category or not, which is an invention.
It's a closed system. But can we just talk about ethics really quickly?
And then I got to go?
I wonder, no, you know, I mean, I would like to.
I really, really would. This is a lengthy chat and this is like going to be brain frappe for a lot of people.
And really, I wanted to thank you for a very engaging and enjoyable workout.
I'd love, I mean, ethics is my big thing.
That's like that to me, that's the whole point.
So I would like to very, very much, but let's hold it off.
Good writer.
Interesting, powerful arguments.
Renegade history of the United States, well worth a read.
You want to check out thaddeusrussell.com, also to check out Renegade University.
Twitter.com/ThaddeusRussell.
And again, thank you very much.
This is the kind of conversations I think that can really, really help people clarify their thinking.
We never want to live in the echo chamber and we never want to pointlessly rail against So I think these kinds of blended chats are very important.
I'm really, really, really looking forward to the feedback that we get on this.
The comments section, I think, is going to be, boom, explosive, if it indeed even exists.
We'll find out. I just want to say really quickly, I just want to thank you for being an exemplary intellectual on this and being totally principled and treating me with complete respect.
And I really appreciate that.
My pleasure. I hope we get to do this again.
Please, everyone, let us know.
This is also going out on Thaddeus' unregistered podcast, which again, you can get at thaddeusrussell.com.
Please let us know what you think.
I love these kinds of conversations.
I love engaging people.
And these kinds of chats, I think it's really, really important, not just the content, but the form, that we're people who disagree with each other significantly, but we can have a very productive and enjoyable discussion.
I like being able to model that kind of stuff, as well as the content.
So Thaddeus Russell, really, really appreciate your time.
I hope we can do it again. Look forward to everyone's feedback.
