4157 Postmodernism's Dangerous History | Stephen Hicks and Stefan Molyneux
"Tracing postmodernism from its roots in Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Immanuel Kant to their development in thinkers such as Michel Foucault and Richard Rorty, philosopher Stephen Hicks provides a provocative account of why postmodernism has been the most vigorous intellectual movement of the late 20th century. Why do skeptical and relativistic arguments have such power in the contemporary intellectual world? Why do they have that power in the humanities but not in the sciences? Why has a significant portion of the political Left - the same Left that traditionally promoted reason, science, equality for all, and optimism - now switched to themes of anti-reason, anti-science, double standards, and cynicism? Explaining Postmodernism is intellectual history with a polemical twist, providing fresh insights into the debates underlying the furor over political correctness, multiculturalism, and the future of liberal democracy."Stephen Hicks is the Professor of Philosophy at Rockford University and the Executive Director of the Center for Ethics and Entrepreneurship. He is the author of several books on philosophy, entrepreneurship, ethics and postmodernism including “Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault.”Website: http://www.stephenhicks.orgCenter for Ethics and Entrepreneurship: http://www.ethicsandentrepreneurship.orgTwitter: http://www.twitter.com/SRCHicksYour 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. It's Stefan Molyneux from Freedom, Maine.
Hope you're doing well. I'm here with Dr.
Stephen Hicks. He is the Professor of Philosophy at Rockford University and the Executive Director of the Center for Ethics and Entrepreneurship.
He is the author of several books on philosophy, entrepreneurship, ethics, and postmodernism, including, well, the one we're going to talk about today.
Highly recommended. Just click on it below and get it.
It's mind-blowing and explanatory to the nth degree.
The book is called Explaining Postmodernism, Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau, Stephen, thank you so much for taking the time today.
Hey, my pleasure. Hope it's a good conversation.
Fingers crossed! I had this feeling when I was younger that philosophy was kind of a lot simpler than people said it was.
And I remember when I first heard this, I guess I sort of intellectually came of age in the sort of early to mid-80s.
And I remember hearing this argument, there's no such thing as objective truth.
Reason is an illusion, all this kind of stuff.
And I just remember thinking at the time...
Well, if there's no such thing as objective truth, is that an objectively true statement?
And this seems like a very obvious, you know, like the emperor's new clothes, the kids saying, hey, the emperor has no clothes on.
It seemed like a very simple thing.
And then when I replied to people who said there's no such thing as truth, is that a true statement, which is everybody's first reaction, I got this...
Jet stream of sophistic fog and goo just kind of flying at me with lots of mental debris and so on.
But it seems to me that's kind of the basic question that philosophy is still wrestling with.
And it wasn't that case for quite some time.
So you talk about premodernism, modernism, and postmodernism.
So I wonder if you can just step people through the major changes between medievalism and then enlightenment and then postmodernism.
Right. Well, your first point, I think, is well taken, because most of us, axiomatically, we take it that reality is reality, and we come to know, and of course, we make mistakes, and we have to correct ourselves, and so on.
But when one becomes more intellectually sophisticated, there are any number of sophisticated, skeptical arguments that one encounters, and one can talk oneself out of Any belief in access to objective reality and that's where large swaths of our intellectual culture are right now.
Now yes, the story though behind that is a long one.
As you say, philosophers have been arguing and wrestling and grappling with these issues now for close to three millennia.
If we do set aside the Greeks and start with the medieval era, I think one of the great things, of course, about the Greeks is that you find all of the major philosophical positions represented and articulated in fairly sophisticated fashion.
So there was no one dominant philosophical viewpoint among Greek culture or Hellenistic culture or among Roman culture.
But by the time we do get to the broad medieval era, there was a more or less unified intellectual culture.
It was essentially a religious philosophy in Western Europe.
It was essentially a Christian philosophy, and we can take that as what I call pre-modernism.
So essentially the thousand years before the beginnings of the modern world, however you take that now.
I think there's some good dates to date modernism from anywhere from say mid 1400s to early 1500s.
If you think about what's going on then, Columbus is crossing the ocean in 1492, so that's huge in terms of exploration and our understanding of the place in the cosmos.
In the early 1500s, we have the Protestant Reformation right beginning, so there are enormous transformations in religion that are going on.
We have the impact of Copernicus's theory that the sun is at the center, and so there are dramatic changes going on both in astronomy and mathematics.
So things are changing fairly dramatically in around 1500, say.
So let's call Medievalism, the 1000 years right before that.
And of course it has all sorts of sub areas, right?
Sub eras rather rather within that.
But what's dominating intellectually and then culturally right for that 1000 years is a view that says essentially reality is the supernatural right world that the natural world is not necessarily an illusion.
Also, some versions of it will say it's illusion, but it's definitely a lower order.
And you can't understand anything that's going on in this world except by reference to a supernatural world, right?
We are created by God.
We were created by God for particular purposes.
And so pretty much everything that goes on in this world should be interpreted as a sign of what God's plan for the world is.
And so that comes out in the form of omens, right?
And then various kinds of superstitions and so on.
This is largely known not through empirical methods or rational scientific methods.
We know this on the basis of faith or we know it on the basis of just accepting our tradition.
But all of our faith or tradition is ultimately referring back to a set of holy scriptures that are received by mystical insight and revelation.
So we have a supernaturalistic metaphysic and a non-rational epistemology fundamentally.
Typically human beings, another important philosophical concern, who are we?
What makes me a human being?
What makes you a human being?
The dominant view here is a kind of dualism, right?
That we are this uneasy concatenation, right, of soul and body.
The body has its agenda, the soul has its agenda, and they are in conflict with each other.
But we are sinful creatures because we really should know better than to give in to our bodily desires.
We should keep ourselves pure and aspire to the higher world, but we don't actually do that, so we are sinful.
There's a strong sense of human collectivity.
Partly it's a matter of humans being born in sin.
We have this collective inheritance from all of the previous generations going back to Adam and Eve, so you don't have a kind of an individual responsibility from your soul, or at least not primarily.
Also, humans are still largely seen as members of collective units.
There are male roles, there are female roles, there's to a lesser extent racial and ethnic divides, even though the races and the ethnicities don't really know as much about each other at this point, but certainly there are class memberships and your position in class membership defines, right, who you are, As an individual, so there's not very much individualism at all, right, in this point.
And then certainly, ethically and politically, right, we are social, we are collectivistic, and we are largely altruistic.
Everybody is bound by networks of service and obligation and duty, and that's the prevailing ethos.
Now, all of that gets challenged and then exploded Fairly quickly in historical time in the early modern world.
Now, whether this was an evolution or a revolution, right, that's something that intellectual historians and historians like to debate.
I think it's revolutionary because historians typically think in terms of thousand year or more chunks of time.
So anytime when just in the space of a century or two, you have deep widespread challenges, right, to prevailing viewpoints, And then new institutions and new cultural practices coming along that are dramatically different from what went on before.
That strikes me as evolutionary.
So what happens fairly quickly, right, in the 1500s, 1600s, and then in that capstone intellectual era that we call the Enlightenment, kind of the long 1700s, is we reject supernaturalism significantly, and most people are much more naturalistic in their thinking.
Maybe there is a God that we take reference to, but we're going to argue our way to the existence of God.
It's not going to be an uncritically faithful acceptance, right, or on the basis of tradition.
And increasingly, intellectuals are saying, well, we don't necessarily even need to appeal to gods in order to explain how the world works.
It's a natural scientific cause and effect.
People become more rational.
We're more empirical.
We're more experimental.
There's better understanding of mathematical tools, scientific method.
And this becomes also widespread in the culture, not just in intellectual culture.
We become much more individualistic.
People make or break their own character.
They have control over their actions.
They should be able to forge their own destiny.
And instead of having these networks of obligation and sacrifice and so forth, the idea of the pursuit of happiness, right?
Life should be self-realization, enjoyment, pleasure.
And so, you know, the pursuit of happiness becomes a cliche, right?
Even in the in the 1700s.
And then politically and socially we see all sorts of revolutions in the direction of democracy, republicanism, freeing up of markets, the rejection of slavery and the underlying racisms often that were associated with slavery, increasing advocacy of the equal liberty rights and contractual rights and so forth of women and so on.
So all of this is on the intellectual landscape.
By the 1700s, So in 200 years, the world has changed intellectually, and we are clearly into the modern world.
So I'll stop there in case you want to jump in on any of those points.
Well, I think one of the big changes, and the causality of that I think is fascinating, which we can talk about a little bit, one of the big changes is always this conflict between concepts and empiricism, right?
So you can have an idea of something that doesn't exist in the world, whether it's a unicorn or a particular deity or whatever.
And the question is, what is the relationship between the concepts and the instance or the empirical?
Now, of course, Plato would say, well, there are these concepts that are out there that are, they could contradict the empirical, but they're the real truth.
And it's the same thing with certain religious mindset.
There's a good, there's a God, there's a virtue, there's a social hierarchy that may contradict what goes on in reality, but too bad, you have to subjugate it to yourself because mysticism and omnipotence and omniscience and so on.
And what I love about this particular period is Is people started to say, well...
I don't care what your concepts are, what can be verified empirically?
And it's the empirical verification, the empiricism that science doesn't have a separate category called, well, it can be self-contradictory or theory, it can be completely opposed by empirical evidence, but it's still somehow valid.
Like, whatever you come up with in your mind, you have to test against empirical material reality, and concepts must bow to the rationality of sense evidence.
And I think that particular shift We're so incredibly powerful because it does empower the individual.
You know, you and I can do scientific experiments, we can reason, we can think, and so on.
But if there are these incomprehensible, contradictory goop of new or mean or higher realities that we can't understand, we just have to be ordered around to obey, we can't really think for ourselves in any meaningful way.
Right. Yeah, so that's a deep issue that, of course, goes back to, as you point out, Plato and then Aristotle, right, in The Next Generation.
Because if we think about human cognition, we do have a sensory perceptual awareness of reality that seems direct and unmediated, but what it gives us is this world of changing particular right entities.
And when we start to think philosophically, we also realize that we have this capacity for thinking abstractly in terms of concepts.
And concepts at first blush do seem to be a different sort of thing.
They don't change, right?
So you're a human being, I'm a human being, we're subject to change, but we're not any more or less human, right, than we were, right, ten years ago.
And human being and the concept, right, of humans has been the same for many millennia.
However, many particular human beings have come and gone.
So then there's the question, what is the connection then between this unchanging abstract concept that we have in our minds and we can play around with it in our imaginations and we can be disengaged from our sensory experience and What seems to be our sensory perceptual awareness of particular individuals.
So, I think what you are pointing to, though, is that in the modern world we got away from the dualism that seemed to have been dominating epistemologically then for the thousand years.
That rather than saying, well, what we are doing with our concepts is tapping into some higher metaphysical realm of perfect unchanging forms or divine essences, right, or whatever that's completely different from the particular changing realm of particular entities to an idea that what we need to do is to integrate,
right, those two, that somehow our abstract concepts need to be tied to particulars And that the particulars give rise to the abstract concepts.
And then the various elements of scientific method that we're doing, setting up experiments, analyzing the results, and using mathematical tools is a way of keeping the connection between our abstract concepts and empirical data.
And as a matter of principle, that that's the right way to go about things.
That is, yes, epistemologically revolutionary.
Now, what would you say was some of the major causes?
Now, I'm always hesitant to dip into causality because then it sounds like deterministic or lack of free will or was impossible before.
And I'm very much for individuals' will history as much as they can, and that's quite a bit.
But what would you say were the major elements that began to really shift Human beings' obsession or gaze to rank imagination and mysticism to a more sort of pragmatic and scientific materialism.
Yeah, well, yeah, that's a fun and fascinating question.
I think we can talk about causality here without becoming deterministic, right, in causality.
And I think what we can do is say there's any number of influences that are always going on, but it's a matter of individual choices about how we are going to react to those influences.
A lot of it does have to do with particular individuals who can confront the same general set of circumstances but make very different choices about how to deal with those influences and so on.
Alright, so I think it's important to take the medieval era, if we say roughly from 500 to 1500 or so, and divide that into two chunks.
From 500 to 1000, I think that was a darker era, definitely.
The decline of Rome, the decline of various kinds of civil institutions that had kept an empire together, and things were relatively dark.
Shorter life expectancies, Increase in illiteracy, right, and so on.
Now this is a somewhat cutesy hypothesis, but I think there is a lot to it and it's not original to me that to say that the transition from 999 to 1000 was extraordinarily important in the psyche of Western Europe.
So those of us who are old enough to remember the transition from 1999 to 2000 remember even though that we are very scientific and rational and so on.
There was a great deal of excitement and borderline superstitious understandings of what might be happening right at that transition.
But if you put yourself in the framework of a highly religious mindset and you believe that Judgment Day is going to come, that you have this very millennialist, apocalyptic understanding, and you combine that with a certain amount of You know numerology, right? The year 1000 looks very important to you because according to your calendar or that's a big change from 999 to 1000 and you can tie that.
So there was a very widespread belief that of course the second coming is going to come.
It's not at some great distant point in the future and then you combine that with wow, we're getting closer and closer to 1000.
The mathematics is perfect of it.
That's when the millennium and the apocalypse is going to happen.
And then when a thousand comes and nothing particularly significant changes is a big deflating element psychologically.
So what happened then in the psychology of Western Europe then is to say, well, I guess the apocalypse is not coming anytime soon, so we might as well get on with business.
And the business is making a The indefinite future and then more now in the present time concerns, and that's matched nicely with the historical record because there are signs that trading starts to pick up significantly right at that point.
As people start to trade, they start to become richer and various other things start to start to happen.
So then you start to see more trade between East and West.
I think one of the very important factors then is that some of the Western European traders, particularly those on the Italian peninsula, started to bring back some of the manuscripts that had been kept in the Middle East.
Cosimo Medici, for example, is one of the ones who should get a significant amount of credit here.
But there was more interconnection between Western Europeans in the Far East and more learning.
And then there's a rediscovery of ancient traditions, Greek and Roman.
Those ideas start to percolate into Western consciousness.
And one of the very striking things here was you can read the astonishment of many of the more open-minded Western European intellectuals, most of whom were monks at this time, but they're reading about the ancient Greeks and they're reading about the ancient Romans and they realize the magnificent cultures and civilizations that they had created.
Before Christianity, and the question on their mind was, how is it possible for them to have created such a magnificent civilization without awareness of Christian doctrine, right?
The one true faith and so on.
So then we started to have the idea that, well, maybe not all of the important truths are captured in Christian doctrine.
Maybe we should be a little bit more open to other cultures and other traditions having some important truths that we can learn from.
And then once you start to go down the road, then the cat is out of the bag.
And by the time we get into the 1200s, we have major intellectuals like Thomas Aquinas who are saying, as an official project, we have to say, yes, of course, Christianity is true.
It's absolutely true.
But also Greek philosophy has a lot of truth in it.
And what we need to do officially is to find synthesis between these two positions.
That is the birth of humanism.
It is fascinating to me to ask the question why the ancient world did not happen upon things like more individualism, free markets in particular, and the Industrial Revolution.
I've heard the argument, which I think has a lot of meat on the bone, which is to say that, well, the ancient Romans, they knew about the steam engine.
Aristotle himself said, a la Francis Bacon, that empirical evidence should always trump what's going on in your head.
The concept should bow towards evidence and so on.
But they just never hit that tripwire of getting modernity going.
I think a lot of it had to do with the fact that they had to slaves, you know, that the huge numbers of people in the ancient world were enslaved.
And therefore, if you're investing in slaves, then investing in labor-saving machinery doesn't actually do you that much good.
And so there was less of that progress.
That Christianity by assigning the seat of humanity to every human being, the soul, meant that it was tougher to divide.
I know that there were like lords and serfs and priests and so on, but it was tougher to dehumanize people in the same way as the ancient world's division into The might makes right the conqueror and the conquered.
And so I think that there was a kind of individualism and egalitarianism in the scattering of the soul among all bodies of men and women that made it harder to have the kind of abject slavery that seems to retard an industrial revolution.
Well, sure. Slavery as an economic force does divide The labor right into manual labor and then various other sorts of intellectual cultural right kind of work as a result of that you also then have a social snobbery that comes out in a kind of elitism so that people who are the cultured and the intellectuals or they're not thinking about physical labor and they're not then thinking about how can we engage in labor-saving devices that's just not going to be on their intellectual horizon so yeah I think there's a lot of traction right to to that argument as well I think you're right.
Christianity is valorizing the soul of each individual, right, is important.
You do find elements of that in many of the Greek and Hellenistic philosophies.
You find elements of it in Aristotle, in the Stoics, and some of the others as well.
So there is a tradition, right, of individualism.
But then it becomes a complicated intellectual and cultural historical question about why did those elements, right, in particular not prevail?
Why did other ones?
So, yes, you can see many of the elements that the moderns took and ran with already in nascent form in Greek and Roman culture.
But the whole package was never put together.
And to mix metaphors here, the clutch was not engaged.
Now, I also think the printing press, which is obviously a pretty cliché thing to bring to bear on the problem.
But the printing press, I think, is fairly huge because when you actually read through religious texts from beginning to end, I mean, I remember when I used to work up north as a teenager, long nights at a tent, you know, I had a Bible and I read it cover to cover.
And it really is quite illuminating when you get your hands on the text itself rather than having it interpreted through you by this elite cadre of priests who are often mouthing Latin and you don't really know what the heck's going on.
And I think when you combine things like the calamity of the Black Death, you know, you've got a quarter to a third of Europe dying from bubonic plague in successive waves.
You've got priests, of course, dying the most because they were there at the deathbeds taking confessions.
That's the most likely to be infected.
And the sort of existing disasters that were going on in Christendom and then when you get to read the actual text and you say, wow, you know, what I was told is not exactly the same as what is written and what is written isn't exactly the same as what goes on in the world for real.
I think then you do start to get A fragmentation of the mythology, because mythology is generally only collectivizable through propaganda.
And then when people can get the original text, start to think for themselves, it did create a big fragment.
And in Christendom, you got the Protestants and all the Protestant sects at war, religious wars and so on.
But I think that the capacity to spread information, you know, the original intranet, I suppose, of the printing press, I think had a lot to do with empowering the individual to think for himself.
Absolutely, yeah. Printing press is a cliche, but it's a cliche for a good reason.
Sometimes cliches are absolutely true.
There's an economic and political corollary to what you were saying.
So if you go to the Black Death and a third to a quarter or whatever the number is that people are dying, one of the results of that, though, is that you have then a labor shortage, right, as soon as the Black Death passes.
And that then means that people who have You're still alive.
They become more valuable and you're more able to assert your economic interests and as a result of that to assert your political interests.
So the lower classes right under feudalism then are in a position to demand more and you start to see a breaking down Of some of the feudal institutions as a result of that.
But I think more importantly, the point that you're making about the intellectual liberation and the increasing intellectual sophistication, that's absolutely essential.
So if you have a move, and here the Protestants get more credit than the Catholics do on this, that says, yeah, it's important for individuals to know the Word of God.
And so we're importantly cranking up the printing presses So anybody can read them.
Well, yes, then what's going to happen is people will be more literate and just that opens up all kinds of worlds to them, right?
Once you start to read, people are going to be more sophisticated in their conceptual understandings.
They're going to think about things.
You're going to have an interpretation.
I'm going to have an interpretation.
We're going to have arguments about it.
So we're going to be more sophisticated in our capacity for discussion and for reason.
And then once again, a cat is out of the bag.
We're going to become smarter.
And that's a critically important part of the rise of modernity.
Let's talk about the effectiveness of this new way of thinking, because one thing that people forget, everyone focuses on the Industrial Revolution, but before the Industrial Revolution was the Agricultural Revolution, which was, of course, necessary for there to be an urban proletariat to, quote, exploit in these satanic mills.
And when you start to look at the scientific acumen that was applied to things like winter crops and things like turnips and so on, you've got a 10 to 15 to 20 times increase in agricultural productivity as the result of bringing new scientific principles and empiricism to bear on the problems you've got a 10 to 15 to 20 times increase in agricultural productivity And when you have a massive example of something that works staggeringly well –
And it would have been the equivalent of the Industrial Revolution in rural areas to see the Agricultural Revolution.
You got, of course, people can survive for the first time with some reliability.
They're not going to die of hunger.
On a regular basis, which happened a lot.
And this seeing, OK, well, let's try science when it comes to agriculture.
Oh, wow, we have 10 times the food that we used to have.
You compare that to let's pray for a good harvest, which doesn't work.
Empirically, we know that prayer doesn't work.
Comparing prayer for food to science for food shows the incomprehensibly fantastic power of commanding nature by obeying her laws.
Yeah, absolutely. So the Industrial Revolution is typically dated to 1769 if you want to put a precise date on it with the James Watts steam engine.
But yes, absolutely already by the 1600s you can see, as you put it very nicely, the application of scientific principles to agriculture, right?
Crop rotation, irrigation systems, animal husbandry, experimentation with crops, and so you have an integration of kind of Scientific chemistry, scientific biology, scientific physics.
And once again, these are just abstract, interesting principles of scientific theory.
They are those principles applied experimentally and empirically, and we're evaluating the results.
Yeah, countries like the Netherlands and England that were doing this most effectively first already in the 1600s, yes, people started to live longer, they started to get taller, they started to get fatter, they started to be less worried about am I going to survive right to the winter.
Now, we don't want to overstate this.
It still was a very dark time right compared to right to 20th century, but yes, The scientific revolution and the agricultural engineering revolution already is well established and having hugely impactful results right by the time we get to late 1600s and early 1700s and then you can make it make the argument That is the sort of thing that frees up the labor,
the capital for the kind of more sophisticated science that started to be done in the 1700s, the more sophisticated kinds of engineers, and the fact that you've got hundreds and hundreds of inventors who can spend lots and lots of time just tinkering And hundreds and hundreds, right, of people doing amateur and increasingly professional science.
And then out of that, we get the great geniuses who are the capstone intellectuals of the 1700s.
So then we do get the transition, as you point out, I think 1769, into the Industrial Revolution.
And what do you think were the major forces bringing that together at that time period?
Well, I think England is usually cited properly as the source of this.
What you have, though, in England is a culture that really is the first nation of the Enlightenment, but we would point back to the 1600s and what's going on there.
So, in the 1600s, England is having its political battles back and forth, sometimes over religion, sometimes over more secular political concerns.
But by the time you get to the late 1600s, England is reaching a point of religious toleration.
So you have formal acts of toleration right in place.
And what that then is going to mean is we're going to not only politically end The forceful attempts to convert people or to ban people on the basis of religion, but also culturally this idea that I should at a minimum tolerate you even though I am appalled by your religious beliefs,
right? And your religious practices and then perhaps even more proactively see you as a fellow human being with the same sorts of rights that I do and seek out opportunities to trade with you and do various other things.
The cultural and political instantiation of religious toleration was hugely important and both Dutch and the British had achieved that right by the late 1600s.
But also I think it's important that Britain had achieved a kind of democratic republicanism again by the end of the 1600s with this idea of widespread Individual rights, right?
And these are not necessarily formally captured in the constitution, but as a political ethos that's widespread.
And by the time we get to the end of the 1600s, it is parliament that is ascendant, right, in English politics.
And so, we then still have a monarchy with a significant amount of power, but it's really parliament that is driving the ship.
So, you know, England had had its Glorious revolution in 1688, right?
When, you know, a king came to the throne and they essentially said, you know, we don't want you to be our king.
Please go away. And the king says, okay.
Please note the use of the word please, unlike in France.
Absolutely. But that's exactly what was glorious, right, about the revolution was it was a revolution without bloodshed.
And yeah, we might say, well, that's very British, isn't it?
It's a small island. We have to get along.
Yeah, sure. So, religiously, politically, England is freeing up its markets, and the agricultural revolution is going on, so people are wealthier.
We should put a plug in for coffee.
Yes, go for it.
That then is to say, The water was not particularly safe to drink, so what had gone on had been the standard practice was for people to drink watered-down wines and beers, but then if you're sipping on wines and beers over the course of the day, that has physiological and psychological effects.
But if we then discover coffee and we start slugging coffee at regular points along during the day, then it has the opposite effect on us, so we become more energized.
That's another thing that was a result of international trade was the English, even though they developed coffeehouse culture.
And coffeehouse culture is also important just in terms of it bringing together people in social networks where they are going to have discussions about all sorts of things, business, science, religion, and so on.
So you then develop a culture in which people are intellectual and conversational, and then they start to develop habits of civility.
We're going to have lots of conversations.
We're going to disagree with each other.
How do we manage the disagreements?
And so that famous British civility has its origins also.
So what we have then is all of the things that are going on in the century prior to the Industrial Revolution.
That is a scientific revolution, political revolution, intellectual revolution, religious revolution, and various cultural revolutions in the direction of better conversation and civility.
So the Industrial Revolution is in part a technical engineering revolution, but it has to have and work with A politics, a certain view of being willing to have social networks that can take the products that come out of industrial revolution and spread them around the culture.
So England was very fertile soil.
Well, and it's the rock, paper, scissors.
Reason is the rock, paper, scissors of society.
You know, like when I get into a conflict with my daughter and we can't, we immediately, rock, paper, scissors, and that's how we resolve our dispute.
And if you have reason, rather than mystical revelation, which can't be proven objectively, if you have reason and empiricism, To resolve your disputes, then you can engage in productive conversations without coming to blows, without hysteria, without escalation, where reason is cast aside, the objective arbiter of human disputes is cast aside.
And you either then become like, you know, two pieces of paper that push into each other, one goes above and one below.
You either dominate or submit based on power or threat or authority or history or tradition or whatever.
Or you fight physically, as what happened with the religious warfares in Germany and other places.
So the fact that they said, okay, reason and evidence is how we're going to disagree.
You know, there's not a lot of cage matches at mathematical and scientific conferences because they don't need to fight through willpower, through sophistry.
They just need to say, okay, well, what does the evidence say?
Can the experiment be reproduced?
Is your hypothesis rational?
And in accordance with other accepted scientific hypotheses and so on, It's a very civilized process.
So the fact that you accept reason means not only that you can have these conversations, but these conversations are productive and very civil because it's not personal.
We're just both comparing our ideas to reason and evidence.
That's right. So the hypotheses will fight it out and die, right?
And one will dominate and one will fail, but that doesn't mean that you and I have to fight it out and one of us has to die or submit.
If you add to that the optimistic claim that the early moderns were making, that every human being has the capacity for reason, then you start to have a widespread view that we need to respect the reasoning process of each individual over his or her, increasingly her own life as well.
So the doctrines of individual rights to Liberty of conscience, liberty of religion, freedom of expression, the ability to act on the basis of my judgment.
All of those rights become increasingly articulated and widespread right in the population.
So it all is mutually reinforcing.
So, I'm going to just do a tiny little rant here with your indulgence, because here now we're at the pivot point to the blowback to postmodern.
So, we did sort of the mysticism of premodernism, and then the empiricism, the rationality, the objectivity, and the empowerment of modernism.
And, you know, man...
I tell you, Stephen, when I read history, when I was first reading history, I'm like, yay, progress!
Woohoo! You know, we've cast aside medievalism.
Everything's going to be upwards.
It's the end of history. It's, you know, because it's so obviously great what's happening and why would anyone want to turn back and so on.
Always forget the blowback.
Always forget the undertow.
That was my big curse in my sort of early studies of history.
And it gave me the optimism that comes before a truly catastrophic Luciferian kind of crash when you get the undertow going on or the blowback.
And I don't know if it's because I was raised in England, but Germans!
Always with the Germans!
I feel like Seinfeld with his Newman, you know, Germans!
right?
Because as I sort of understood later, and tell me what you think, you had a huge amount of resources being gathered and controlled by anti-rationalists or by mystics or by supernaturalists or by Platonists or whoever.
Like they got a lot of money, they got a land, they got a lot of resources, you got the clergy, you got the king, irrational authorities based upon divine will and power.
And they don't give up without a fight, you know?
And that I think was the big challenge.
And we can get to Kant who basically said that he had to destroy reason in order to save religion.
But when resources begin to shift from the mystics to the rationalists, from the supernaturalists to the empiricists, well, they don't like that, obviously.
They like the fact that there are more resources.
They just don't like the fact that the proportion tends to be going to other people.
And this comes to as simple as the capitalists, the entrepreneurs, the rationalists, and so on.
They were just having more kids, right?
They had more money. They had more resources.
And this is before the welfare state.
So more money meant more kids.
Less money meant fewer kids.
It's almost like a genetic war between the genes for sophistry and the genes for rationality.
But this blowback was, you know, an ideology is almost never more dangerous than when it's losing, because when it's winning, it can afford to be gracious.
But when it's losing, it's like a cornered rat and kind of goes for the jugular with whatever infection it can find.
So let's talk about how the genesis of the undoing of modernism began, and I think you talk about in the book, particularly in Germany, and how they managed to win, which is like a horrifying thing, given the evidence against them.
Yeah. So that's an important story.
So we talk about modernism and its capstone accomplishments culturally and intellectually in the Enlightenment, the long 1700s, but you do start to see blowback in the middle part of the 1700s.
Partly it is coming from conservative voices.
So you say here's the Enlightenment is saying it should be all about progress, it should all be about science, it should all be about rationalism, but that is already a threat to traditional religion.
So you should expect the religious conservatives to be upset about this and pushing back on this.
And partly it's going to be on intellectual matters because science is based on reason, on empiricism, so we should expect then an engagement right with the epistemological arguments.
Are there limitations to reason?
Are there limitations to To empiricism, can we make intellectually respectable in the modern world some sort of faith or authoritarianism, right?
And sorry, just to buttress that, they can't attack on the evidence because the clergy said for a thousand years, we'll make your life better, and they didn't.
And in fact, life got worse in many ways, especially with the grim memory of the Black Death.
The empiricists, the rationalists, the scientists, they came along and said, well, we'll make your life better.
And boy, did they ever.
Like, they can't attack. It's like the Marxists, which we'll get to later.
They can't attack based upon the empirical evidence.
So they have to go deeper into the metaphysics and epistemology.
That's right. So the epistemological arguments become more sophisticated, right, at that point.
Now the other part of it though is the normative implications because along with the rise of modernism and the Enlightenment is an increase in individualism, the idea that you should be free to do That also is a threat to long-standing moral traditions that are much more communal,
collectivistic in their orientation that say, no, what it is to be a good person is not to pursue happiness, but to do your duty, to perform your obligations, to sacrifice.
A noble person is not someone who's concerned with me, me, me, but with a willingness to sacrifice for the sake of others.
And so the blowback then is to say, well, you know, if you just are becoming individualistic, isn't that just going to be turning people into a bunch of selfish, you know, atomistic, grasping people and all of society and community is going to then be undercut and so on.
So we need to put limits not only on reason and empiricism, but limits on the pursuit of happiness and individualism.
So we get some conservative blowback.
I think it's important.
And sorry, helping the poor was a big issue as well.
It was one of Jesus's commandments was to sell everything you own, give the money to the poor.
And helping the poor was a foundational ethos behind Christianity.
The church, of course, would take a tithe, often 10%, and redistribute it to the poor and so on.
And that didn't really solve the problem of poverty now, did it?
But then, of course, when capitalism comes along, free markets come along, and the science of agriculture comes along, the poor actually get helped.
So it's like, do you give your money to the church so the church can give money to the poor who are just going to have more kids?
Or do you go start a business?
Do you go invest in a business so that you can increase the demand for labor, which then raises the wages of the poor in a very sustainable way?
And this is the big argument between free markets and the welfare state, which is right now.
Do you transfer income or do you generate opportunities for the poor?
And I mean, I know which side I sit on.
I think I can suspect which side you sit on.
But even something as simple as helping the poor Giving your money to the church, which had been tried for a thousand years, didn't help the poor, in fact made things worse, versus giving your money to a capitalist, which raises the wages and meat consumption and longevity and survivability of the kids and all that.
They even lost the argument of the central ethos of helping the poor.
Yeah, so that issue, the sub-issue about helping the poor also does point to a broader issue, that what happens in The modern and enlightenment world is in a way a deeper challenge to the traditional ethos, just in the sense that we think the problem of poverty and all of the other problems are in principle solvable.
So for the first time in human history, you have a widespread intellectual and cultural movement that says we can make progress right in solving all of the problem by our own efforts.
And that is a challenge also to the traditional worldview that had said no, in fact, The world is in decline, right?
Things are getting worse and worse.
It's run by Satan.
It's a veil of tears.
It's a horrible, torturous passage you have to get through to get to heaven.
And it's like, well, that's only because you guys didn't use science now, right?
Isn't it? So you're managing the decline, right?
And it's a very different mindset to say, no, decline is not or should not be the natural state of human beings, but rather solving Having problems and having that optimistic view that we can do so.
That's like with Obama saying, well, those manufacturing jobs are just not coming back now, are they?
And it's like, well, no, if you have more free market principles, they certainly do.
Okay, sure. Well, that would be another variation right on that argument.
So rather than seeing history as a series of cyclical things, it gets better and then it gets worse and it gets better, but there's no overall progress or there were the good old days and now we're in a period of decline.
This view that says individuals can improve their condition as individuals and then culturally we can set up institutions to make all of society better.
That's also an affront.
This does come out, though, to come back to the particular issue that you're raising, right, about the poor, because the goal of charity, philanthropy, and so on, up until modern times, was not actually to solve the problem, right, of poverty, but just rather to ameliorate, temporarily, right, the problem of poverty.
The poor are always going to be with us, but it's more a matter of We solve their problem for today and we demonstrate our own goodness in being willing to give up for the sake of helping the poor temporarily.
But it's a very different mindset to say what we should do is empower the poor to solve their own problems and we can eliminate poverty.
So we're into a different ball of wax.
Now, I think we also, though, do need to talk about The different cultures, because you did mention Germany right earlier, and the Germans do figure importantly in my book.
But if you think about the conservative voices in England and in France, they were largely defeated, not only intellectually, but also culturally.
So if you go back to Henry VIII, When he broke with the Catholic Church, one of the things he did, of course, was confiscate significant amounts of church land.
So he took away their economic power base.
He took away their political economic power base in England.
So England was, whether you agree with those tactics or not, able to manage the conservative blowback a whole lot better.
France, in a much more bloody form, part of what they were doing, of course, was executing lots of nobles, executing lots of priests, and so they also confiscated huge amounts of the Conservatives' economic power base and their political power base and so on.
So it might not then be accidental that the major blowback comes from further eastern places in Germany.
Part of the interesting thing is that there was awareness of the Enlightenment, In Germany, but it never got that deep.
And so what you had was a large number of intellectuals who are more conservative temperament and Kant would be an example here.
But what they were doing is that when they are looking to the West and to them the West means France right in England.
They are looking at it with worry, right, and to some extent, right, with disdain.
I mean, if you look from the German perspective, if you have any conservative instincts in you at all, right, then what you're doing is you look at the French Revolution and you say, wow, you take those European or Western European Enlightenment ideas and you put it into practice, what does it mean? It means killing the king, killing the queen.
Cutting off the heads of nobility, hunting priests down and killing them.
You're destroying all of the institutions that are holding society together.
You're causing civil war and things, of course, were nasty in France.
And then out of that, of course, this is a little anachronistic for Kant, but you get someone like Napoleon.
So you just totally destroy the cultural infrastructure of society and you get Napoleon.
And then what we go from is You know, an absolute monarch of a certain sort in one generation to an absolute monarch of a different sort, right, one generation later.
So the question that is going to be if from their perspective the enlightenment is dangerous and we now have empirical verification that it The elements of the Enlightenment that are important, but put them in a more conservative framework that is now much more intellectually rigorous.
And so I take that to be something like Kant's project.
Now, maybe a more interesting case is going to be right on this point here is Rousseau, who was a generation earlier.
And in some ways he's conservative, in some ways he's radical.
He's a very interesting mix.
But you do see in him, you know, a very smart guy identifying all of the elements of modernity.
And you can almost do this in a template list form and say, you know, this is what modernity stands for.
I hate this.
I hate this. I hate this.
I hate this. And I'm giving arguments right against it.
So you do have a blowback beginning in Rousseau as well.
Well, I think it's a fair case to make that if Rousseau had been replaced by Locke, or if Locke had been able to write that elegantly in French, that you would have ended up with something more like the American Revolution rather than the French Revolution, because Rousseau, with his sort of primitivism, with his collectivism, with his anti-rationality, was someone who did lay the foundation.
I view Rousseau as anti-rationality, as anti-enlightenment, and paving the way for the reign of terror under the French Revolution.
Again, we can drill down into the French Revolution, but at least in the third phase of the French Revolution, the one that we are most familiar with, the phase that involves Robespierre and Marat and Saint-Just and the others, all of them are card-carrying, so to speak, Rousseauians, right?
So they are explicitly saying, we are applying Jean-Jacques Rousseau's philosophy right here.
And so you do get a very nasty political revolution instead of a more temperate Lockean revolution.
Here's a sentence which I think is worth drilling down.
Because whenever I say that Germany was sort of counter-enlightenment, I'm always told, but Germany had all these great philosophers.
And I'm like, you know, I hate to sort of say this, but for me, people like Kant and so on were anti-philosophy because they were Basically triumphing mysticism and collectivism, which to me is anti-philosophical.
But you wrote here, the era from 1780 to 1815 is one of the defining periods of the modern era.
During those 35 years, Anglo-American culture and German culture split decisively from each other, one following a broadly enlightened program, the other a counter- Enlightenment won.
And this battle, which to me was played out militarily in the 20th century with the World Wars and is also being played out demographically with Merkel's addiction to migrants, the idea that Europe is somehow one big blob, you know, European civilization, Western European civilization, you got to slice and dice it because the Germans, for a variety of reasons, which we can certainly talk about, did set their It sort of pikes against the oncoming horsemen of the Enlightenment.
Yeah, so we're speaking in broad strokes, and you're right that we need to slice and dice.
And all of the things that we're now going to say, there's further slicing and dicing that we need to say.
There are lots of bad English philosophers, bad French philosophers, and lots of good German philosophers.
But it is important that by the time we get to the end of the 1700s and on into the 1800s, it's Germany that does become the leading intellectual nation, I would say, in the world.
So the 1600s was the century of the English, and then the Scottish in the early 1700s.
So we have figures like John Locke, Isaac Newton, and others.
The French were brilliant in the 1700s, so we have the massive encyclopedia project, which is one of the great achievements of all time.
Diderot, d'Alembert, Montesquieu, Voltaire, and the others.
But it is German philosophy that becomes most important.
By the time we get into the 1800s, Kant died in 1804, Hegel, Fichte in between the two of them, Schleiermacher, Schopenhauer, Marx, Nietzsche, all of the huge names that we need to know.
We're going to be philosophically educated.
The underdogs work harder and they were kind of losing at the time.
I'm sorry? Well, the underdogs generally work harder and they were on the losing side at the time.
So they kind of, you know, the victors are like, woohoo, we've solved these problems.
We can relax. We can go and have a mistress.
We can go and travel the world.
We've solved these problems. Whereas the underdogs work very hard to get their point across.
The team that loses generally trains harder.
Yeah, that's exactly right, because if you go to the early 1600s, what's happening is Napoleon is ascendant on Europe, and to put it bluntly, he comes through Germany and kicks everybody's butt, and the Germans are shocked by this, they're appalled by this, and they say, how can we lose?
And how could we lose to the damned French, right, of all people?
And so their national pride, or even though it's not a nation yet, but their ethnic pride is wounded, And they explicitly say, we Germans need to get our act together.
And we need to get our act together philosophically.
And this is one of the reasons why Johann Fichte is extraordinarily important Because he had a very strong reputation as leading philosopher of his generation and he kind of stepped out of the ivory tower to deliver some addresses that were widely received right all over Germany saying we need a new philosophy,
we need a better philosophy and we need to dramatically reshape our political and especially our educational institutions in this new philosophy To get to Germany.
They were extraordinarily effective in the 19th century, right?
At doing so.
Now, yes, what you can do is say that all of the philosophers of the 19th century, they're clearly in the modern era, and none of them are conservative thinkers in the sense of just saying we need to go back to the good old days and reinvigorate some old philosophy that's already been worked out.
What we need to do is to take the kernels, right, or the core Impulses or ideas right of the earlier philosophies and argue them in much more sophisticated form against the now prevailing enlightenment philosophy.
So it's not necessarily that we're going to be wholesale in our attack against reason, although many of them will go down that road.
What we need to do is have sophisticated arguments that will put limitations right on reason.
And it's not that we're going to totally deny the individual, right?
Rather, we're going to nest the individual within some broader communal social framework, right, and so forth, but in a more sophisticated form.
So that's, I think, the importance of the project of Kant, of Fichte, and Hegel.
And then, of course, you then find there are unintended consequences, right?
Once those arguments are developed in very sophisticated form, And the arguments are brilliant.
They are subtle, and in many cases they are original.
And if they then capture the minds, as they did, of the leading philosophers, right, of each generation, each generation then says, okay, we're working within the Kantian framework or the Hegelian framework or whichever one it is, and then we take it to the next set of implications, to the next set of implications, but it becomes increasingly negative as we go along.
Well, and that to me is one of the great frustrations, is how complacent people get in victory.
Because to me, this creation of this alternative realm, this platonic realm, this realm of heaven or nirvana, where contradiction equals fact, irrationality or anti-rationality equals truth and so on.
To me, that's studying and working in philosophy like somebody who wants to wreck a building studies a building.
Not to build a new building, but to destroy an existing building.
It's like peeing in someone's clam chowder and calling yourself a chef.
It's anti-philosophical to create an alternative realm wherein error equals truth.
It destroys the entire point.
And it's so frustrating to me, these turning points in history.
And it's similar to, I can't remember which free market economist decided it wasn't really worth it.
Pushing back against the general theory of employment and so on that came out of the interventionist school.
The Keynes School.
But they didn't sort of say, okay, well, now we've got this big challenge.
People are saying that rationality is not valid universally or is an inferior form of human knowledge.
We better close off this.
Man, this rip in philosophy is going to have a whole lot of Quasi-demonic intellectual forces pour into our countries and our culture and undo them from the inside.
They're just like, ah, you know, it's just some Germans typing or writing.
Does it really matter that much?
And man, it really does because when these errors, these anti-philosophical viruses get into people's brains, it seems like it takes war or disaster or, I don't know, prodigious intellectual effort to uproot them.
Yeah, all of those things.
Yeah, absolutely. Partly you're raising the question of individual psychology right and motivations and so we would have to again drill down to each individual thinker and we do know right that some people will when they are young they'll make a commitment to a certain worldview and what they will do when confronted with challenges to that worldview is double down right on anything that will enable them to protect right to their worldview so they're not I think this is going to be more true of more of the philosophers to say that well,
There are other value commitments that I think are very important, and I cannot square that with an understanding of certain sorts of reason.
And so, this is a more good faith right approach here.
I think there is this value that is important, and if there's a threat to that value from a certain conception of reason, then I will argue against that right conception of reason.
But I will do it in sophisticated philosophical form.
But then the second part of that then is to say, as you were arguing there, that the reaction then of other people should not be complacent.
Philosophical victory is never complete.
One of the things that we learned from history is that every generation always has representatives and typically sophisticated representatives of all of the major philosophical alternatives.
And what happens typically is, you know, there's a genius or two who comes along who has a new synthesis, attracts a large number of people.
So then you have schools, then you have movements, then you have cultural change, right?
And so on. The other ones never truly right to go away, right?
What they do is they repackage themselves in more sophisticated form.
So rather than saying, yes, I can rest on my laurels, right?
All of these problems are solved.
That's never right going to be the case.
Philosophy is hard and we always have to argue and re-argue every position in every generation.
And then just unfortunately, what has happened is that the great geniuses really of the 19th century were putting philosophy on a slow path to self-destruction, whether they were doing so honestly, or whether it's largely a matter of unintended consequences, or whether it was a matter of irrational, and they knew it, irrational prior commitments that they are defending by rearguard actions, but nonetheless successfully doing so.
That just needs to get teased out.
But I do like your point that we either fight these things out intellectually or we do fight them out in a physical battlefield.
And if we do get into the 20th century, I do not think it's accidental, right, that when we look at the major wars, right, of the 20th century, it is This is too crude, but it is largely people lined up behind various German philosophers and then versus people lined up behind various English and British philosophers.
Oh, I think we, and with your patience, let's get there because, and I take it very personally because, you know, you're paid to philosophize, I'm paid to philosophize.
We stand on that wall and we protect the common people who don't have our particular abilities or interests to fight against these ideas.
And they give us money to guard against the wars that result if we don't protect The world from bad ideas.
That's our job. That's the gig.
And if you don't take that very seriously, if you rest on your laurels, then you are betraying the people who are paying you to a fate that in some cases is, in fact, worse than death.
So I just wanted to point that out.
Yeah. So to do a computer analogy, right?
We're like the computer programmers, right?
And we're fighting against viruses.
And there are people who intentionally unleash viruses.
And there are unintentionally unstable elements that emerge in networks, and we have to be vigilant on those.
At the same time, we want to be developing new and better systems to solve problems and so on.
But yes, a lot of this I know we've spent some time on this.
We can go a little bit faster with your permission, but let's do a quick leap from sort of Hegel to Marx to the failures of Marxism, which I think did provoke the attack upon epistemology that characterizes postmodernism.
Yeah. Well, already in Marx, the epistemological revolution has occurred, right?
That's occurred in Kant, in Fichte, and Hegel.
So Marx is really two generations right after that.
If we say 25 years or so is a generation.
So already in Marx, you do have in his epistemology, right, the view that the mind is not autonomous and operational.
It's passive and conditioned by its environmental forces.
So that's already a retreat from the individual empowered autonomy of the Enlightenment.
The mind is passive and shaped by external forces.
Already in Marx you get second generation polylogism.
So there is not a universal set of logical and or rational principles that govern the world and or are thinking about the world.
But again, rather different people are conditioned by different environmental circumstances and so what seems reasonable and rational to them is going to be different.
That then is, if we just follow this epistemological line, that means if you have two people from different classes who have been conditioned to think differently and rationally when they meet with each other, there is in principle no way for them even to understand the other person's position, much less for them civilly and cooperatively to appeal to objective facts and reach some sort of a resolution.
Yeah, the lion and the zebra cannot find common cause any more than the capitalist and the proletariat.
Exactly, that's right. So necessarily, just on those epistemological points, you're seeing the groundwork for the need for all human conflict to be resolved, again, by some sort of compulsion or forceful methods.
So Marxism is already a retreat then, a significant retreat from the Enlightenment, But the way is already paved by the philosophers and I know Marx is most known as a As an economics guy because he put primacy on economics, but he did have a PhD in philosophy and he was up to speed on all of the current trends in philosophy as per the 1830s and 1840s.
So, yes, so Marx is a good one.
Now, Marx is also an interesting case here because Marx was largely in the doldrums as far as European philosophy went through the 1800s.
And probably nobody would know who Karl Marx was now, except if you're an obscure or an intellectual historian interested in obscure 19th century German philosophers.
But he did succeed in inspiring some very effective revolutionaries, Lenin, Stalin and the others, who mounted effective political putschers and revolutions in the 20th century and rehabilitated his reputation.
So his is a philosophical system that has had huge impact, not necessarily directly for philosophical reasons, but for more political and economic success reasons that are perhaps could have been avoidable for other reasons.
Well, and of course, it was called scientific socialism or scientific Marxism.
It was considered – and, you know, the evacuation of the soul that occurred with scientific materialism and Darwinism, I think, gave people the sense that we were storm-tossed leaves and so on, blown about by our environment.
And this is one of the things I think that was lost with the discarding of the soul that happened to a lot of 19th century thinkers.
But Marx himself made very specific predictions.
Ooh, you know, that's always tough.
When you make predictions and you call yourself scientific, one of the big challenges, of course, is that people at some point will check your predictions against what actually happened.
And you do talk about these three main predictions that Marx made that were not only, they didn't only fail to come true, the exact opposite occurred as Marxism played out and as capitalism played out as well.
Yeah, no, that's an interesting issue, whether Marxist scientific socialism is a pretense, right, or whether it was genuinely right intended.
One of the things that we do find is in certain forms of far-left thinking that when push comes to shove, if there's any sort of a conflict between the scientific commitments and the socialistic commitments, it's the socialistic commitments that prevail and the willingness then to reject anything to do with science, fact, and evidence.
But at the same time, to be fair, there are a large number of people who were on the far left Who thought of themselves as scientific socialists and when the scientific evidence went against socialism, they did modify their views.
And largely what you can see is Neo-Marxism, and there are any number of versions of Neo-Marxism, they're starting to develop after Marx's death in the 19th century and on into the 20th century, people saying, well, look, yes, Marxism, classical Marxism did say this, and it doesn't seem that that's working out.
So we need to tweak the theory or modify the theory in various ways and see how that's going to work.
So to the extent that the Marxists are going down that road, then I think their claim that they are being scientifically socialist is legitimate.
But then you have to go on an individual right case by case by case basis.
Well, I would say also that if the theory, if the exact opposite is produced in what the theory predicts, you might need just a little bit more than a tweak.
Yes, right, sure. And so depending on how big the failure of the prediction is, then you start to get into major changes and then you have all of the in-house debates that are going on in far left circles.
Well, you're not really a Marxist anymore.
You have to start calling yourself something else because that's not just a tweak, it's something more significant.
So the thesis, though, that I'm making in my book is that all of this comes to a head by the 1950s, that you do have a...
The French! Now it's the French.
We do the Germans patouille.
Now we do the French patouille.
That's right. Yeah. So, yeah, the Germans had been devastated, right, by World War II. They don't have credibility on any stage, right, whatsoever.
So it's out of that set of ashes that another intellectual culture comes along, and this time it's going to be the French.
But yeah, the game really was up for most people who were thoughtful intellectuals interested in Marxism by the 1950s.
And this is a bit crude, but the numbers are nice, because that's really one century.
Communist Manifesto was published in 1848, so 1948.
What's going on in the world in 1948?
Well, Again, you can say, gosh, you know, we even if you're if you're a true believer, committed Marxist socialist or neo-Marxist socialist at that point, you have to be saying, look, Marx made certain kinds of predictions about the way the world was going to go.
It's been a century now, right?
And that's 100 years worth of data that we should be able to assess.
And if the communist revolution has not materialized after a century, then unless we are just religious millennials or apocalyptic thinkers, true believers, we have to engage in some serious rethinking.
And the first generation postmodern thinkers, as we come to call them, are all young men, mostly some young women, who are finishing up their formal education by the 1950s, committed to far-left politics, but then realizing that classical Marxist socialism is a non-contender intellectually and something more sophisticated.
It's not going to just be tweaks anymore.
It's a major re-strategization that has to happen here.
Well, and we see – sorry to interrupt, but they – I think in particular when the cult of Stalin began to be really revealed in the West, because there was this huge cover-up in the New York Times sending Walter Durante out to pretend that somehow these Potemkin villages are masterpieces of economic progress.
And so as the truth about the tyranny within Russia begins to leak out, and as Russia, of course, seizes Eastern Europe at the end of the Second World War and imposes the Iron Curtain, and you have this little microcosm of an experiment of East and West Berlin, even in the post-war period, seeing which ones are free, which way the guns are pointed on the giant walls, it becomes which way the guns are pointed on the giant walls, it becomes impossible to sustain not just in terms of theory or data, but in terms of vivid, powerful Powerful visceral data.
Like there's a giant wall with barbed wire and machine guns pointed at the people in East Berlin and in East Germany and so on.
And I think it becomes unsustainable at a very physical level to maintain the idea that this is somehow progress or benevolent and so on.
And the success of capitalism in the post-Second World War period was extraordinary.
Looking at the resurrection of Germany when they finally had a decent finance minister who revalued the mark and so on and opened up free markets.
There was so much evidence at this point.
And then when the gulags under Stalin and the show trials and the slaughters and the millions of people in the gulags all came out, I think it became completely unsustainable.
That's when they shifted to an attack on reason combined with the importation of collectivist cultures through demographic immigration who are more likely to vote for the left.
They just put their finger on the scale rather than re-evaluate the position.
Yeah, so broadly speaking, I think that's right.
And all of that's coming to a head right in the 1950s.
So there's much Much better journalism that's available, right?
There's international radio, there's international television, the newspapers and all of the pictures can be widespread.
And part of, of course, what had driven socialism or particularly Marxist socialism was a set of normative convictions, right?
That somehow socialism is going to be more humane and more decent and more caring.
Capitalism is all about just money grabbing and greedy capitalists, right?
And so forth. But by the 1950s, it's very hard to make any sort of a normative comparison of East and West That's in the favor of the East because all of the negative things that you are just running through are being widespreadly available to not only intellectuals, right, but everybody. But at the same time, we can look to the West and we can look at the lot of the poor and they are, you know, they're buying cars, right?
They are starting to buy air conditioners.
They have televisions, right?
They are getting overweight, right?
So they're not being, they're not being, they're not being starved.
So, whatever moral qualms you have about the lot of people in the Western cultures under capitalism seem much lighter compared to the real brutalities and the real deprivations that everyone is aware of.
If you're just more intellectual, setting aside those normative claims, you know, the Marxist had make certain scientific allegedly predictions, right, about the dynamic Of a capitalist society, right?
Class competition, you have winners and losers, right?
And so forth. And that then predicts a certain result that what we're going to end up with is a large number of people increasingly pushed into poverty and increasingly exploited and a small number of capitalists at the top who control all of society's wealth.
And it was increasingly clear as the decades go on that we're not getting more and more poor people.
Instead, we're getting fewer and fewer poor people.
We're not getting a smaller number of really rich people.
Instead, there's more and more millionaires in different sectors and so forth.
And so the exact opposite predictions are going on.
So even if you set aside the more normatively charged claims that socialism is making and just look at it as a kind of social science, Or an applied sociology.
This is how capitalist society is going to work out.
None of those predictions are working out.
And this causes then An intellectual crisis in far left circles.
So if you read the deep thinkers of the 1950s, you find them saying, look, we just have to do something significant.
We're committed to left thought of some sort, but the Marxist version is not going to work, so we need something new.
It's going to be out of that that postmodernism comes along.
And it's unfair. I just want to point out, like, if you and I are playing chess, Stephen, and you're a better chess player, then I should graciously say, wow, you know, great moves there.
I guess you won the game.
If I'm like, we need to call in an airstrike on Stephen because he's beating me in chess, it's like, that's really kind of going outside the bounds.
And if reason and evidence are going against you, calling in intellectual airstrikes on reason and evidence is cheating and should have been exposed as thus.
And people are kicked out of university saying there's no such thing as truth.
Well, there's nothing for you to teach then, is there?
That's right. Well, that's the fork then in the road that each individual, right, confronts.
Now, to their credit, you do find a lot of people on the left who are drifting away from classical Marxists.
They become communitarians.
They become liberals, right, of various sorts.
They become different kinds of socialists.
Some of them become conservative.
Some of them become libertarian.
My sense Demographically is that that's a minority of people, but those are people all of whom have some intellectual honesty, right?
Whatever their youthful commitments, right?
They say, I am going to be committed to the evidence and the reason and I'm going to drift away and go on a different odyssey.
So the ones that we are concerned with, the postmoderns, right, are going to be those, though, who are calling the airstrike, right?
If it is the case, That we've had this battle between modern capitalism and modern socialism and modern capitalism was bound up with the industrial revolution.
It was bound up with the scientific project.
It was bound up with an individualistic ethos.
If all of that then has achieved victory And rather decisive victory right over my left socialist commitments, then I am going to try to blow up the entire Enlightenment project.
And that's explicitly what you find among the first generation postmodern intellectuals.
The way that we'll frame it, this includes Michel Foucault, Richard Rorty, John Gray and the others, is to say, We, as postmoderns, will use that label sometimes sparingly or distancing themselves because there are differences among themselves over what this means.
But what they will say is, To be postmodern, right?
Is to take this big picture, philosophical, historical stance, right?
The entire modern world, right?
We are opposed to that.
All of the fundamental intellectual institutions, right?
Of that, right? Or the enlightenment and all of the key premises, right?
Of the enlightenment, we think, These are what they are.
We don't like the results of them.
We are opposed to them.
So it's a very sophisticated anti-modernism, anti-enlightenment.
We need to go post that.
And that's what we're trying to articulate.
Well, this is the most astounding thing.
So again, these are very, very broad strokes.
And forgive me if I go up.
Correct me if I go astray. So we start with...
In the very primitive world, it's all kind of mysticism.
There are ghosts in trees and you pray to your ancestors and you apologize to rocks for having to move them out of your garden and so on.
There's this weird spillover projection of consciousness into everything.
And then you kind of get this division that starts with Plato, where we say, okay, the empirical world, yeah, there's reason, there's evidence, and so on.
It's fine. You know, it's a distant cousin, but the real value is in this higher realm.
And that goes through Christianity as well to varying degrees of emphasis and focus.
That there is an empirical realm of reason and evidence that has value.
You know, we've got to survive in the satanic world of the here and now.
But the really important thing is this other dimension where contradiction is allowed, where feelings are epistemological tools of cognition, and faith is the same as proof, right?
So there's these two realms.
And when the empiricists came along, the modernists came along and said, forget, really forget about that other realm.
Let's just really see what happens if we just say the realm of reason and evidence.
And we see that takeoff.
I mean, we see that takeoff in ways that have never before been experienced in human history.
Now, the postmodernists come along, and Kant was saying, okay, yeah, there's this nuomenal realm that's better, there's this empirical realm.
Sure, it's reason and evidence, not that important.
Now, the postmodernists come along, and there's this quote that really struck me.
It's right at the beginning of the book. It's Foucault, I think he says.
It is meaningless to speak in the name of or against Reason, truth, or knowledge.
Ah. See, now Kant said, okay, reason, truth, or knowledge, sure, but there's this other realm, right?
There's this bifurcation of metaphysics and epistemology.
But these guys, it's pure nihilism.
There is nothing—we can't even talk against reason.
That's how incomprehensible the world is.
That is how futile and impotent human consciousness is.
It is an—and this is why I think there's such compatibility with the primitivism of Rousseau and the nihilism.
Of the postmodernists because they won't even engage in an argument against reason.
They just say the whole thing is one big convoluted Gordian knot.
It's better not to speak of it at all.
But I'm still going to be a philosopher.
Right. So yes, in one way, it's a sophisticated philosophy that ends up as an anti-philosophy.
So if you say... Traditionally, what philosophy has been is about, you know, what's the truth?
What's the nature of reality, right?
What counts as knowledge?
And the end road of postmodernism is to say that, you know, all of those concepts have been exploded or been revealed to be a fraud.
So, we have our standard arguments, for example, over the existence of God, right?
And one side wants to say, You know, the reality is that there is a God, that God can be known, and the truth then is a positive success concept for identifying a connection between a belief and an actually existing thing.
And the other side then wants to say, no, the truth is that there is no God, right?
And any claim to the existence of God is the opposite of knowledge.
It's an opinion or something else.
But built into that, right, is the idea that, right, We should work out trying to see what the right answer is.
The postmoderns are skeptical, right, to the point where we're saying, look, we've been arguing about, say, that particular issue now for thousands of years, and one side has good arguments, the other side has good arguments, and all that then shows is since we can't rationally prove and convince, right, apparently intelligent people of the truth of one position or another, that this whole debate is really a non-debate.
That when we are trying to reason about things like the existence of God or not, or what the ultimate truth is, we're out of our depth.
Now, this is something I think Kant first put his finger on toward the end of Critique of Pure Reason with his antinomies of reason.
And the postmoderns are then just several generations of saying, look, it is pointless to try to say what the truth is.
We've been trying. It's a failure.
Let's accept the failure.
Whatever we mean by truth, it can't be That we know something or other.
Well, we have all these competing knowledge claims.
Nobody can convince anybody else.
So whatever we mean by knowledge, it's not what philosophers traditionally have been about.
So let's just set aside this issue.
Is there really a God or not?
We're not going to solve that problem.
Is the soul immortal or not?
Do we have free will determinism or not?
We don't know. We're never going to know.
So let's set then aside the concepts of truth.
Set aside the concepts of knowledge, reason, and so forth.
And whatever it is that we are doing, we have to redefine that project.
And then typically what we then end up with is what seems to be is that people have prior commitments based on their cultural conditioning or perhaps their ethnic conditioning.
That people do get conditioned in various ways and they're in conflict with each other.
So really what we call truth is just what I've been conditioned to believe.
And if my group, when it's in conflict with your group, is able to prevail, then we now have the power and we can legislate that our truth is the real truth.
But really all it is is conflict and power.
That's the reality.
It's a social reality.
Everything else is Well, and that to me, you get into this, I really, really want to urge people to get this book again.
We'll put the link to it below.
But it's the contradiction that you explicate so well at the end of the book, which is, okay, if there's no such thing as truth, then there can't be any such thing as goodness, right?
So the old Socratic project that reason equals virtue equals happiness can't make any sense because reason is impotent, therefore there can't be such a thing.
As virtue. So at the same time, as the postmodernists say, there's no such thing as truth, and there's no language to describe virtue, they have this political correctness that destroys people for acting in immoral manners that are largely made up, you know, the racism, sexism, patriarchy, Islamophobia, homophobia, and so on.
And this is weird thing.
And the motives I think are really, really important.
You know, like the governments often want to disarm their populations, not because weaponry is bad, but because they don't want to have the population have the ability to fight back against a tyrannical government.
So I do have a strong suspicion that the postmodernists talk about abandoning reason and abandoning truth and abandoning objectivity.
Not because they believe these things are invalid, because if they did, the last thing they would ever be is politically correct.
You know, if there's no such thing as gender, then how on earth could you have a gender wage gap?
If there's no such thing as truth or racist, then how could there be racism?
If there's no such thing as good, then how could racism be evil and so on?
But I think what they want to do is disarm their opponents so that they can flex their Darwinian political muscles to gain power over others that they've disarmed with this intellectual sleight of hand.
In other words, it's the thief saying, you don't need a dog.
You don't need an alarm system.
I mean, that's crazy. Yeah.
All right, fair enough. I'm in favor of the broad spirit of what you're saying.
I think the way we handle the contradictions, you're quite right that the postmodern movement broadly conceived is rife with internal contradictions.
And in some way, they're fine with that intellectually because they come out of an intellectual tradition that says you only have a problem with contradictions if you think that reason and logic are good, true and universal.
But we have abandoned that several generations ago.
So one way of handling though the contradictions is to say, you know, if I am a philosophically minded postmodernist and I come to the position where intellectually I say something like this and allow me the paradox, you know, the truth is that there is no truth, right? Or the correct position is that there is no such thing as correctness, there is no objectivity and that's just the way it is.
Is then to say, okay, if that's what I am convinced of intellectually, there still is then the question of what I do as an individual human being, because I have my particular value commitments, my political agendas.
And if truth doesn't matter, if reasonableness and so forth doesn't matter, That then will license me then just to say, okay, I'm just going to take my strongly felt passionate commitments and just go for it.
And so you can say, sure, yes, but you said there is no such thing as the truth, but now you are trying to urge a certain course of action right upon me and saying that yours is the right position.
Then I can say, well, yeah, that's fine.
It's just, you know, I'm not saying that it's the truth.
I'm just saying it is my value commitment, but it is the case that We live in a culture in which people respond to arguments, and if I make certain rhetorical moves on them, sometimes that works to augment my power, right?
To get what I want right out of the world.
So if there is no truth, you might as well just absorb your particular beliefs and go for it.
And of course, you're going to be doing the same thing, so it's just going to be a power struggle, but that's how I square the contradiction, largely by ignoring it.
But then there's a generational issue.
We are now into third or perhaps fourth generation of postmodernism as time marches on.
The first generation postmodernists were operative in the 1950s and 1960s.
And things are moving along.
So what we get, though, by the time we get to the second or third generation is going to be intellectuals who are not particularly well-educated.
They might be clever, right?
They might be smart. That's a nice way of putting it, yeah.
But if you are coming out of an intellectual tradition that does not valorize reason, does not valorize logic, Does not say it's important to understand different points of view, to give their arguments the benefit of the doubt, to put them up against your own, to be willing to change your mind, right?
If the first generation postmodernists have said all of that is crap, then the second generation of postmodernists are not going to go through any of that effort.
Instead, they are going to be intellectuals who by and large have been exposed to one intellectual tradition, right?
The postmodern skeptical one, And they'll have picked up all sorts of rhetorical tricks and rhetorical tools.
And from their perspective, all of these concerns about contradiction and reason and ultimate truth and so forth, that's a little bit old fashioned.
What we now really are is just about power, just about our agenda and using whatever rhetorical We still think there's something to reason.
You might say, ha ha ha, you're coming out of a tradition that's got all kinds of intellectual contradictions.
Well, we're not really intellectual anymore.
We are activists, and activists operate on different principles.
Right. Now, let's close, and I really, really appreciate your time, but let's close on, I don't know, a couple of to-do lists, because I certainly know that my audience is very interested in protecting and promulgating and expanding reason.
And right now, we are...
The underdog's about to be plowed under the historical irrationality of accumulated error.
So we now have the energy of the underdog and we have the reason to fight of the underdog.
And if the underdog fights hard enough and recognizes the stakes, the underdog can win.
I mean, we're not just fighting for our intellectual lives.
We're not just fighting for the lives of our culture.
History is very clear what happens when the hard left gets into power.
Well, people like us are dragged out and shot in the streets.
I mean, we're actually fighting for our physical lives, according to the examples of history.
What do you think?
Oh, let's be activists.
Yeah, let's be activists. What do you think would be the best approach that people could take?
I mean, I really feel the West is hanging in the balance now, and there's a lot of damage that's been done, which hopefully should provoke an immune system response of reasserting rationality, empiricism, and objectivity, philosophy, for want of a better phrase, against this primitivistic rot that has come in through the media and through the academe.
What do you think would be the best way for people to...
Push back against this gooey tide of anti-rationality.
Yeah. Well, I think civilization is always in the balance.
We just think of the last 200 years of history, the Napoleonic Wars, the Civil War, World War I, Depression, World War II, Cold War, and so on.
So that's nothing new.
So we always have to fight for the values of civilization.
And it's a huge project because if you think about any baby that is born, it is not a civilized being.
All of the thousands of things that go into developing the knowledge, the skills, the character, and the habits of being a fully civilized human being Every generation has to learn that, and if we're going to have a large, complicated civilization of hundreds of millions of people, that has to be successfully achieved for most of those people most of the time.
Otherwise, we do retreat to barbarism.
And it does seem to be the case, as a lesson of history, that we are pretty much always going to be up against Well-motivated, sometimes well-funded, well-organized, in some cases well...
With tenure. Yeah, with tenure, right?
People, cultural and political movements that disagree with what are genuine values, right, of civilization.
Now, I'm a philosopher, right, by training, and I think this is not, you know, the hammer seeing everything as a nail, right?
But that philosophy is the most important part of this cultural battle.
And the way we were talking about it before, we are intelligent beings.
That means that we can try out different ideas and put them to the test without ourselves having to suffer or die.
We can test them out in the laboratory, so to speak.
And that's largely what universities are.
There are laboratories for all sorts of ideas, and we should expect that every generation will take all of the major ideas, all of the major positions, and try them out.
That's what we want young people to do.
That's the classical ideal of liberal arts education.
But it has to be that each generation, the actual values of civilization prevail in the minds of most young people that go on to assume positions of responsibility.
And we have failed in the last two to three generations at doing so.
We're now seeing the implications of that rot manifesting itself.
But it's been tough because they've gathered control of media and academia and don't let the opposite view in.
So we do have a multi-front cultural battle.
And on some of those cultural fronts, we are, in fact, underdogs.
That's true. I think large sections of higher education, particularly in the humanities, have been captured.
But we're not underdogs in various other sectors of society.
And so, you know, it's encouraging to see mobilization in those other cultural sectors as well.
And we do control the memes of production.
That's a good formulation.
But then also within higher education, I see also very helpful signs of pushback.
That's where I spend my time.
I think one of the things that has enabled postmodernism to spread as far as it has right within higher academic has been a kind of neglect that people who are actually working on interesting problems and solving issues and making progress and so forth have kind of been aware that there's these postmodern stuff going on but they look over at and they say that's nonsense or that's crap and I'm just going to ignore that and then focus on my right particular problem And then that led to some space for the postmodernists to capture certain institutions and to increase their power base within higher education.
But then when they reached a certain tipping point, We actually have a problem here.
I need to fight back.
And so I need to set aside working on these projects and start to push back against postmodernism.
It's fine when you see a couple of termites, but then when half your house collapses, it's time to deal with the problem.
Yes, that's right. Yeah, I don't want to go too far down the insect analogy, but...
Fair enough, yeah. It's a tad dehumanizing, I get it.
There's some dangerous territory there, right?
But yeah, there are people who are intentionally subhuman and they are within the higher education.
But there is a sign that there are lots of very smart, articulate people with good philosophical premises in a large number of academic disciplines who are pushing back.
I think students also are wising up many of the departments in which postmodernist ideas are most widespread.
They are suffering declining enrollments.
You know, if you're a young person, you know, 18, 19, you want to make something of your life, you go to university and of course you want to party and meet girls, right, or whatever, but you also want to get an education and so if you take a course or two or you hear through the grapevine that this course is just going to not teach you anything or it's going to teach you that you're a worthless human being in some respect, you'll stay away from that.
You'll seek out something better.
Donors are wising up, you know, the million and 10 million dollar checks are not being cut the way that they used to be cut.
So there are various pushbacks that I think, you know, cautiously, optimistically, in 10 years, I think things will be better.
But the most important thing, though, is that the postmoderns do have some sophisticated arguments, right, rooted in philosophy We need to know what those arguments are, and we need to know how to argue against them.
So, when they say things like, you know, there is no truth, right?
That everything just is power, right?
That you are just a, you're just a, you know, a coalition of various ethnic, racial, so forth, identities.
You have no individual autonomy of your own.
That science is just a white male Eurocentric construct.
We need to have a lot of people who know how to detect the flaws in that position and to articulate the positive response to that.
Otherwise we will not succeed.
So we need more philosophy and we need better philosophy.
Good, good. Well, that's fantastic.
I do sort of view us as, I shouldn't say, I shouldn't include you.
I view myself as a rationalist who is fighting against the priesthood of collectivism using the new Gutenberg press of the internet.
So I think that history repeats itself just sometimes with more electricity.
So I really, really want to thank you for your time today.
It was a fantastic conversation for me.
I really want to encourage people to dig into the great prose and And tables.
I mean, the tables are really clear, and they really, really do help in terms of pre-modernism, modernism, post-modernism, great mental bookmarks for understanding this stuff.
The book is Explaining Postmodernism, Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau de Foucault.
The link is right. Attached to the show notes, the website is Stephen, S-T-E-P-H-E-N, Stephen Hicks, H-I-C-K-S.org.
Again, the link below. Ethicsandentrepreneurship.org and the great Twitter feed at SRCHicks is worth checking out as well.
