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Sept. 29, 2021 - Viva & Barnes
01:59:28
Sidebar with Barnes and Barnes!
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Time Text
It's official.
I didn't hit go live.
I was thinking of my intro joke so much that I actually forgot to hit go live.
And I was going to say, go live.
How do I know that it's not intended to say go live and not do the live stream?
And while I was thinking of my wonderful joke and tinkering with the lighting, I realized I didn't hit go live.
Which makes me an idiot.
Are we live and are we hearing everything?
F?
Yes, lots of Fs and legit so.
This is going to be very unique.
Now, I don't want anyone to get disappointed.
Dr. Gordon Barnes does not look quite as much like Robert as he did in the thumbnail.
But one thing is amazing.
Genetics.
Genetics are an amazing thing.
You cannot escape genetics.
And it is amazing to see people within the same family have such similar features.
And, I mean, I spoke to Dr. Gordon Barnes, Gordon Barnes, it's a good name, for all of 15 seconds before we went live.
And I don't know if demeanor-wise there's going to be any similarity, but it's going to be fun.
So, for everyone who doesn't know, tonight's stream is with Robert Barnes' brother, who is, I guess, a doctor.
We're going to find out which kind of doctor, but not the one I can ask my hypochondriacal medical questions to.
A published author.
And while we're on that subject, I'm going to put in the chat the Amazon affiliate link, my Amazon affiliate link.
That's right.
I'm trying to get a cut of any book sales that he gets.
So there's my Amazon affiliate link to Gordon Barnes' book, which you can get on Amazon.
And I know people say Amazon is the devil.
You don't want to support them.
Amazon has its big problems, but it allows people to sell their work and their hard, fruits of their hard labor.
And get it out to the world.
So there's that.
What else?
Standard disclaimers.
We are streaming live on Rumble.
Every time I do something with my hands now, I'm nervous that someone's going to take a screenshot and claim that I'm a white supremacist.
We're live on Rumble.
We are...
Where else are we live?
That's pretty much it.
Super Chats.
Everybody knows the rules about Super Chats.
YouTube takes 30%.
Rumble has something called Rumble Rants.
Rumble takes 20%.
So, better for the content creator, better for the platform, because you can support a company who supports free speech.
It just so happens that YouTube is just so darn convenient.
I will do my best to read your Super Chats or bring them up if you will be upset if I do not do that.
Don't give them.
I don't like people feeling miffed, rooked, grifted.
What's another word?
I shouldn't say the other word.
And what else?
Be respectful.
Be courteous.
This is going to be amazing.
Let me see here.
Viva!
This is the world we live in, where one has to worry about one's gesticulations while doing a live stream for fear that someone will grab a screenshot if I'm doing, like, three.
Because, you know, everyone counts one, two, three.
Or it's the world in which we live.
A world which has been poisoned by the thought police.
So with that said, actually, who downvoted?
That's a good question.
I know we have a couple of trolls because every now and again they show up to shoot a few insults, insult me or my intelligence, and then they scuttle off.
I don't mind it.
Don't eat that.
No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
Sorry.
I actually have a backpack that I care about if the dog chews on.
Every now and again, I know there's some trolls in there.
I don't mind trolls.
They keep you honest.
They keep you self-reflective.
For example, we have a new merch shirt.
Which is out there.
And one person said, why would you use a warmonger like Abraham Lincoln?
And someone else said, are we emboldening Barnes too much by comparing him to Abraham Lincoln?
I didn't respond to either.
They're legitimate thoughts.
Okay, good.
My response is, have a sense of humor.
Art is art.
Talix makes the best memes on Earth.
And if you don't have a sense of humor in this life, it's going to be a long life.
A long, unhappy life.
With that said, the Barnes and the Barnes are in the house.
Which one do I bring in first?
I'm going to bring in Gordon first.
Gordon, how are you doing?
Good to be here.
This is going to be surreal and amazing.
Now I'm bringing in your baby brother.
Hey, Robert.
Not bad.
How are you doing?
Good, good.
They're fixing up the plumbing here in the house.
You might hear a little noise in the background, but not too much.
I had to just turn off my dehumidifier, which was making the noise.
So...
There's going to be a lot of this until people get over the novelty of having two Barnes's on one stream.
So, okay, I mean, we're going to...
Elevator pitch for anybody who doesn't know who you are, Gordon.
What you do, and we're going to dive into some past, and I want some dirt on Robert.
All right.
Yes, good.
So I am Associate Professor of Philosophy at SUNY Brockport.
I've been here for 17 years now.
And before that, I taught at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota.
And I work and write on a little bit of everything.
So I've been all over the place.
I've written in philosophy of religion, political philosophy, metaphysics, epistemology, a little bit of everything.
So I sort of move around a lot over the years.
But that's what I do.
I teach philosophy and write philosophy.
And I tell my students in almost every class, whatever view you hold on a subject that we're talking about, I have probably held that view at some point because I changed my mind a lot.
And that also lets them know, whatever your view, feel free to speak up and tell me what it is.
Fantastic.
And we're going to get into this because I think the experience of teaching in academia through the evolution of what we've witnessed over the last, whoever's been paying attention, maybe 10 years, but for the most part, four or five years, that's an experience we've got to get into.
But going way back, To childhood.
Now, you're Robert's older brother.
There's a sister in there.
I forget exactly how many siblings you all have.
Yeah.
So I have three older sisters.
I grew up with three older sisters, and then me, and then Robert, and then a younger sister.
And there's 20 years between the oldest and the youngest.
So we sort of came in stages.
My early childhood was with three older sisters, and then Robert came along.
And that changed everything.
And then there was a sort of second childhood with Robert.
But yeah, there's six of us in all, and 20 years between the oldest and the youngest, and it's four girls, two boys.
And now I know that I've asked this before, and it might be new to people who are watching, but this is all from the same original marriage, or is this a...
Yeah.
So 20 years between first and last.
Yep.
Yep.
That's right.
Yeah.
So, yeah.
So in my early childhood, I was, you know, G.I. Joe was having tea with Barbie and Ken.
And then late childhood was, you know, throwing baseballs through house windows while my dad was trying to sleep.
So it was two very different childhoods.
Yeah, was that a baseball?
Or for some reason, I thought maybe it was like a basketball or something that went through that window.
I think probably both.
I think there was a baseball and there was a basketball.
There was probably a soccer ball at some point, too.
All that went through the window.
Yeah.
Our neighbor apparently didn't like us playing in his backyard, so he put up a fence to stop us from going into his backyard.
And that ended up being a very useful soccer goal because that's how we decided to use it.
It had nice, neat posts and almost the same structure.
I don't think our neighbor was a fan, but hey, that was his problem.
Now, you're born in Michigan, but I assume you don't really remember much of Michigan.
I don't remember anything of Michigan at all.
So I was two when we moved to Chattanooga.
And my first memories are in Chattanooga, Chattanooga, Tennessee.
And then from then until I was done with college, I was in Chattanooga.
So I only remember Chattanooga.
That's right.
Yeah.
Your parents did what growing up again?
My dad was an accountant.
He was a cost accountant and a controller.
And my mother was a stay-at-home mom, though for a little while she worked as a nurse's aide on third shift.
She did that for a little while.
What do you remember in terms of dad's employment in the sense of when you were growing up?
So when I was growing up, when we first moved there, he got a job with Crane, the Crane Corporation.
And they weren't stationed in Chattanooga, but they placed him in Chattanooga.
And then over the years, when I was growing up, he worked for a couple different companies as a cost accountant.
And then in the recession in the early 80s, he became unemployed as an accountant.
And so he worked every kind of odd job you can imagine.
Throwing newspaper routes.
He worked as a clerk in a hotel overnight on third shift.
And then eventually doing inventory in department stores on third shift.
So he did every kind of job you can imagine in those years.
And that was very much a function of the fact that he had an accounting degree, but...
And he was a public accountant, but he was not a certified public accountant.
That's right.
And that became, he ended up caught between being overqualified or under, which I still find peculiar, the idea that you can be overqualified for a job, but overqualified or underqualified for almost everything and ended up having to just find whatever, you know, could pay the bills.
That's right.
Yeah, when he became an accountant, so he graduated from college in 1959, and when he became an accountant, CPAs hadn't taken over the field.
And so there was no reason to become a certified public accountant.
Over the next decade or so, I suppose, the licensure of being a CPA took over, really took over the field.
But it was in a time when he was having kids, he was gainfully employed, and then eventually over the years, it became necessary and he wasn't a CPA.
Now, Gordon, I presume your childhood was pretty standard, pretty normal.
Loving parents, a stay-at-home mother, like nothing traumatic that otherwise affected you.
But how old were you when your dad passed away?
So I was 16 and Bob was 11 when my dad passed away.
How old was your dad?
My dad was 52. He was 52 years old.
Yeah.
And he was actually working third shift.
So at this point, so this was in 1986.
And as I say, my dad worked any kind of job he could get.
And at this point, he worked for a company called RGIS.
And what RGIS did was they did inventory in department stores over third shift while the store was closed.
So these people would get into a van in the morning, and they would drive for several hours, and then they would get out and do inventory all night.
And it was actually at midnight one night on the job when my dad had a heart attack and died.
And so we got the phone call at the house in the middle of the night.
And I was 16. Bob was 11. One of my older sisters and my mother went to the hospital.
And when they called, they actually didn't tell us that my dad had already passed away.
They just said he'd had a heart attack.
But we later found out that he was DOA.
So, yeah, I was 16. Bob was 11. Yeah, it was March 31st, 1986.
It was the halftime of the Duke-Louis game, is how I remember it.
Now, in terms of my contempt for licensure commenced because of the fact that Dad couldn't get jobs commensurate to his capabilities solely based on certifications.
Certifications that did not really correspond To actual ability.
And did it impact you in the same way at that time or was it later?
You know, truth be told, I didn't really think about that much at all until years later when I was teaching a political philosophy course and I decided to use as a textbook Milton Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom.
And I was reading the chapter in which Friedman rails against licensure, and he's talking about the negative effects, how people who are perfectly capable are crowded out of the market as a result of this sort of contrived licensure.
And that's when it hit me.
I was like, hmm, that sounds familiar.
Yeah, and that's when I realized, I thought, yeah, you know, Dad not being a CPA.
Did exactly that to him.
But I didn't think about it like you did until years later.
It was really years later.
But, I mean, Gordon, this is for both of you, actually, but how do both of you and how does the family cope with the loss at that time?
You have six kids, a stay-at-home mom, and three kids 16 and under.
First of all, Gordon, do you remember how Robert dealt with it?
Do you remember how you dealt with it?
And how did you deal with it?
And how did the family, if you ever get over something like that, how do you cope with something like that?
Yeah.
Well, I can tell you that I have very vivid memories of how Bob reacted to it initially.
I don't know how much we want to get into that, but his reaction was the most dramatic right from the beginning, truth be told, of all of us.
And it burned into my brain.
I've told just a few people very close to me this story, but, you know, I'll tell you.
So when we got the phone call and my mother and one of my older sisters went to the hospital, I walked back to the back bedroom.
And Bob was down on his knees praying at the bed.
So I thought, I'm not going to bother him.
And I left.
A couple hours later, when my mother and my sister got back, They told me that our dad had passed away.
And so my sister Marty and I, we walked to the back bedroom where Bob was, Robert was.
And Robert pulled the sheet up over his head.
And he didn't want us to see his face.
And my sister told him, said, you know, did you know that dad died?
And he kept the sheet pulled tightly over his head.
At the funeral, Bob, at the end of the visiting hours, Bob went over to my dad's casket and my sisters and I were standing out in the hallway talking and we looked back into the room where my dad's casket was and Bob was talking to my dad and then he put a piece of paper in the casket.
None of us said anything or asked him about it until years later.
You know, it was maybe, it was probably 20 years later that I got up the nerve to say, Bob, what was that that you put in the casket?
And Bob, Robert told me, sorry, I'm used to Bob.
Robert told me that in those days, our dad would give him puzzles and math problems to do on a piece of paper.
And Bob would do the puzzles and the math problems and give them back to my dad.
And that was the last set of puzzles and math problems that he'd given Bob to do.
And so Bob put him in the casket and he told my dad it was going to be okay.
But throughout the process, Bob's reaction was really dramatic.
I was pretty numb.
I was in shock.
I was in complete shock for months.
I just sort of couldn't believe it.
Honestly, I'm still that way about death.
I'm sort of incredulous.
I don't believe it, right?
But it was hard for all of us because we were a close-knit family, really close-knit family.
And that's one thing that struck me, though, was everybody deals with death in their own way.
And it's different.
It's really, really different.
So one of my sisters right away wanted to write a biography of my dad.
And she was talking about my dad all the time.
I didn't want to talk about anything, right?
I didn't want to talk about it.
I didn't want other people to talk about it.
I wanted to be alone with my grief.
So that's one thing I learned from that, definitely, is everybody grieves differently, very differently.
So we all dealt with it in different ways.
And it was hard.
And it also changed the dynamics of the family in a lot of ways.
And some were, you know, there were some positive effects.
My mother, in some ways, had been a little bit closed off over the years.
And at that point, she started to think, you know, maybe we could do some things differently.
So it did have good effects, too, I think.
Yeah, our dad was always doing stuff like that in terms of...
Math stuff.
When I was eight years old, he gave me Space Odyssey 2001.
And I was like, looking at this, I'm like, I'm supposed to understand this?
How am I supposed to understand this?
He gave us some scientific experiment thing.
I forget what that was.
Then he got agitated, or he was disappointed.
He was never agitated, really.
But he was disappointed because I couldn't figure it out.
But so he was always doing stuff like that.
You know, different sort of intellectual projects and what have you.
Now, in terms of other aspects, I mean, Dad was science fiction.
He loved to swim.
And some of those aspects you picked up on more so than I did, like particularly swimming.
I'm still not.
Well, that was because my mom had the idea of dumping me off at one of these swimming places that when you're five years old, they drop you off in the deep end and see if you can swim.
It traumatized me.
I was like, I like being around water.
Still don't want to be in it.
That was not the best way to train, God bless, Eastridge training system.
But early on, when did you start swimming and was that because of Dad or was that because of your own interest?
Yeah.
So that was in part because of Dad, because we would go up to the pool at the top of the hill, which existed when we were small and then it closed down.
Dad would take us all up to the pool at the top of the hill and we would swim.
But it also started in New Hampshire.
My father was from Rhode Island and my mother was from New Hampshire.
And we spent our summers, us kids, in New Hampshire all summer long working at the diner that my grandparents owned.
And that's in the Lakes region in central New Hampshire on Lake Winnipesaukee.
So one of the things that they had us do when we were little, this was really the older half of the family especially, was we all took swimming lessons.
So we started swimming on Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire, too.
So it was a little bit of both.
It was swimming with Dad in the pool in Chattanooga, but then also swimming in New Hampshire in the summer.
Yeah.
Here's a question, speaking of family dynamic.
In my side of the family, my mother and her brother, my grandfather passed away when she was 12. And the dynamic changed in that her big brother, Assume the role of the father figure that was missing in the house.
Did you have anything of that similar dynamic, Gordon?
Did you become the father or did Robert assume more of a fatherly role for what was now missing in the family?
Yeah.
You know, I would say different people took turns doing that.
My older sister, I mean, my older sister, Brenda.
Did it for a while at times, even though she was married and out of the house, but she was in Chattanooga.
She did it for a while.
My older sister, Martha, the whole time I was growing up, she was like a second parent to me.
So she did it for me.
And then I would say in different ways, Bob and I each sort of took turns doing it a little bit as well.
But really...
All my siblings, everyone in my family is very different personalities.
Like, incredibly different personalities.
The variety is kind of astonishing.
And I'd say everybody took a turn doing that.
There wasn't really a single person.
Now, lately, probably, in some ways, Bob does.
But we all kind of took turns doing that.
And to start with, the older ones did it for the younger ones.
But over the years, I'd say everybody has sort of taken turns doing that.
Yeah, my sister Martha worked like crazy shifts, like triple shifts in order to keep everything the lights on.
And I remember, I mean, to give you an idea of how severe it was, I once went in to ask her what she wanted to eat.
And she was like in and out of sleep.
And she just gave me an order.
And it was an order that she had received.
I was like, you want all of that?
Five?
I don't understand.
And that's the level that she worked.
She worked crazy hours for years just to keep things going.
Now, how early was it that you started working for our grandparents up in New Hampshire?
Oh, right.
So my grandparents owned this diner.
In Meredith, New Hampshire.
It was called Inner Lakes Dairyland.
I think it started in 1959, I want to say.
So all of us kids would go up there and work for the summer as waiters and waitresses and busboys and prep cooks.
And we did it to help pay for our private school tuition.
That was what we started doing it for.
So I started when I was probably 9 or 10 working as a busboy.
And we didn't start off right away working 40 hours a week, but pretty quickly we did.
So we weren't up there on vacation.
We were working 40 hours a week to make money.
But the diner was an amazing place, really.
It was an incredible place.
I learned a ton up there about life and about community.
Because basically everybody from this small town, Meredith, New Hampshire, or a lot of people, came to the diner.
And it created like a second family, a second community for them.
And the seating was in a circle.
It was in sort of a rectangle, actually, around the grill and all the other food.
So people would talk to each other, right, across in every direction.
And it was an incredible variety of people.
So, you know, I remember things like there was a guy named Harold, a middle-aged guy named Harold, who was...
Cross-eyed.
And he was legally blind.
And Harold would come in, big heavyset guy.
Harold would come in, and Harold clearly wanted people to believe that he could read the menu.
So Harold would pick up the menu, and he would often hold it upside down.
But he would look as if he was seriously trying to read the menu.
And then he would order.
Nobody said a word to Harold.
Nobody gave Harold a hard time.
Everybody knew Harold wanted And there was just such an incredible variety of people.
There was a guy who was independently wealthy, but you would never have known it from the way he dressed.
And then we had the two dishwashers were both mentally disabled, Frank and Jack.
And they came from what was then called the State School in New Hampshire.
And they were interesting individuals.
So Frank...
Jack was illiterate.
He couldn't read.
But he could identify every make and model of motorcycle that there was.
So on his break, I would go out as a little kid and I would sit with Frank on the curb.
And a motorcycle would come by and I'd say, Frank, what is that?
And he'd say, it's a Kawasaki 650C, whatever.
And then Jack, Jack was also illiterate.
But Jack could fix any appliance you can imagine.
It occurred to me recently that Jack was a little bit like the main character in Sling Blade in a lot of ways.
There was similarity.
Well, long story short, it was like an island of misfit toys, but it created this sort of family in a way.
These people came from the community, and it was like a diner version of Cheers.
So, we learned a lot about, you learned a lot about hard work, you learned a lot about, you know, making your own money, and you learned a lot about relating to other people.
As a kid, right?
The adults would all interact with us, just like they interacted with everybody else.
So, it was a great learning experience over the years.
I learned a lot from it.
Now, I guess we're going to jump ahead a little bit, but...
When do you go into philosophy?
What did you study?
Well, first of all, Robert asked this a lot of everyone else.
Now, high school-wise, were you guys in public schooling, private schooling?
And what was that experience like?
And then how do you get into philosophy later on that line?
Good, good.
So we went to a private school.
Here's part of the story that's important that I want to tell you about us growing up.
Because when you asked if there was anything unusual...
I don't know quite how unusual it was, but it's important, at least for the way I developed.
We grew up in a very devout religious family, especially when I was growing up.
It sort of became less so a little bit as Robert was growing up.
But right before we moved to Chattanooga, my mother had a conversion experience, and she became a born-again Christian.
And when we got to Chattanooga, we joined an independent Baptist church.
That was very, very traditional, very, very conservative.
So we grew up in an independent Baptist church, and we went to the private Christian school that was affiliated with the Baptist church.
So I sometimes tell people that I honestly think that my education in high school was probably a lot like the education you would have gotten if you were...
A 17th century Puritan in New England.
It was the Bible, the Bible, and more of the Bible.
And I both loved it and hated it from the beginning to the end.
And probably I'd say even now, love it and hate it.
Because on the one hand, there were some really great things about that.
So I remember sitting in a pew in church with my whole family lined up in the pew.
My five, my sisters and brother, and my parents, singing hymns, old gospel hymns, like, you know, How Great Thou Art, Amazing Grace, Give Me Gas in My Ford, Keep Me Truckin' for the Lord, right?
And, you know, it was a great family experience to be together like that.
And my father had this incredible baritone voice.
He had a beautiful baritone voice.
And I love to listen to him sing those hymns.
So some of those experiences were positive.
We also, so we memorized, us kids, we memorized huge passages out of the Bible.
So there was a time when I was eight or nine years old when I could quote for you verbatim Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, and Colossians.
So you could say, Gordon, Colossians chapter 3, and I would say, if ye then be risen with Christ, seek those things which are above, where Christ sitteth on the right hand of God, right?
And on and on.
And there were at least two good things, I think, that came out of that.
On the one hand, we learned to have to sit down and study, right?
You had to sit down and study for hours to memorize this.
And then there's the fact that the language of the King James Bible is beautiful English, right?
It's one of the high points of the English language, if you ask me.
So now when I remember some of the passages that I remember, I think, boy, I learned some great vocabulary in learning all that.
All right.
Well, fast forward.
The point is, by the time I hit adolescence, though, I hated it, right?
I chafed against it.
I wanted to go to movies.
Now, Bob and my dad, Robert and my dad snuck away and went to movies.
That's another story.
When the rest of us were in New Hampshire, they snuck away and went to movies.
The rest of us couldn't go to movies.
I wanted to go to movies.
I wanted to listen to rock and roll.
That's what I really loved.
So we had this huge stereo that had a record player and speakers at both ends.
And I can remember as a kid.
12, 13 years old, sitting at one end with it turned down at night.
Pretty sure my parents were asleep so that I could listen to rock and roll music.
So I hit adolescence to get to the answer.
I hit adolescence and I was rebellious.
I didn't like this.
I hated it.
Up in New Hampshire, my grandfather was telling me...
Because my grandparents were not religious believers.
They were just not religious people.
So I remember my grandfather telling me, Gordy, you don't have to believe that stuff that your parents believe.
You don't have to believe all that.
And so I started having questions, lots of questions.
I was like, what do I think?
Do I think this is true?
Is there a God or isn't there?
Is Christianity true or is it a myth?
Is it all made up?
And then our father died.
Right.
And a lot of things were really, really hard.
And that's when I started getting interested in philosophy, especially in college, because I had these questions about religion and I wanted answers.
And they weren't just abstract questions.
They were personal questions.
Right.
I wanted to know, is there a God or not?
Is some religion true or not?
So I thought.
I'm going to study philosophy to see if I can figure out the answers.
And that's really how I got into philosophy.
I also initially planned to go to law school, but I got totally sucked into philosophy.
And that's how I got stuck doing it.
What I remember early on is you reading Kierkegaard, because I was trying to figure out how to pronounce the guy's name.
I was like, when did that come about and what led to that?
Good.
So I stumbled on a book.
And at that time, this is very early college.
So it could just as well have been in the religion section of a bookstore as the philosophy section.
I don't remember which.
But it was a book by a guy named Gordon Marino, who I think still teaches at St. Olaf in Minnesota.
And it was a book about Kierkegaard.
And what interested me, of course, was Kierkegaard is someone who believes in faith against reason.
You can follow the passion of your heart.
We can't figure out these things intellectually anyway.
Make a leap of faith.
And I was sort of sorting this out, trying this out.
So my first great love in philosophy was Kierkegaard.
And I still have texts of Kierkegaard in which the pages are like falling out because I've read them a thousand times.
Over time, I'm not as much a fan of Kierkegaard as I once was.
But that is how I got started.
And then when I majored in philosophy, I started reading lots of other philosophers.
But that is how it got started.
That's right.
Well, Gordon, now I've got to ask the obvious question, but ultimate conclusion on belief in God or is it still evolving?
Good.
Still evolving.
I am officially an agnostic who probably three days a week...
Leans towards believing in God, and three days a week leans against it, which is probably my personality as much as anything.
I've gone back and forth on this a lot.
So I spent most of my life a believer, a theist, and a Christian of some sort.
I pass through like every denomination there is.
But I'm still, I'm sort of a hopeful agnostic, I would say.
I'm deeply sympathetic with religious aspirations and religious belief, but I'm also in some ways skeptical.
Life will do that to you.
Sorry, Robin, I think this is from a portion that you might recognize, Gordon.
Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit after the traditional men, after the movements of the world, and not after Christ.
Colosseum to faith.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That's fascinating.
What led to divinity school along that path?
Oh, good.
So in college, I was still a believer.
I was still a Christian theist.
And I discovered a guy named Nicholas Wolterstorff, a Christian philosopher, was teaching at Yale Divinity School.
Now, divinity schools, historic recently, many of them have been much more theologically liberal.
I was at the time pretty orthodox in my thinking.
So it was like...
Either a traditional form of Christianity or nothing for me.
It's going to be one of those two.
Wolterstorff was a really open-minded, thoughtful Christian philosopher.
And I actually was in the library in Chattanooga going through catalogs.
And I came across the Yale Divinity School catalog.
And I knew about Wolterstorff already because I was writing my senior thesis on Wolterstorff.
And I saw that he was at Yale Divinity School.
And I remember thinking, wow.
That's fantastic because I want to study with this guy.
So I went to Yale Divinity School to study with Wolterstorff.
And then while I was there, two other really good Christian philosophers went to Yale, Robert Marahue Adams and Marilyn McCord Adams, both of whom, so I sort of lucked out.
There were three really great Christian philosophers there while I was there.
And then, of course, Robert was there, too, as an undergraduate.
Yeah, I mean, it was going through the corporate law process.
I learned to retell the story, but it was one of the interviewers.
For those who don't know, your second year in law school, first semester in the States, is when you do interviews with corporate law firms to get a job that summer, with the goal being that then they will give you an offer so that when you're done with law school, you go to work there.
Everybody goes through that process if you're in a certain part of the law school class.
Early on, I was getting no callbacks because I was telling the Yale story too, honestly.
That was one problem.
Not good for corporate law firms talking about how you left the Ivy League school to protest its policies.
The other was somebody figured out they asked me questions about, okay, so you went to Yale, but your brother had also already Committed to Yale at the same time, Yale Divinity School.
And I was like, yeah, that's true.
And they said, okay, then you went to Wisconsin Law School.
I said, yeah, that's true.
And your brother was there getting his PhD in philosophy at the same time.
I said, yeah, that's true.
And they said, so shouldn't we worry about wherever your brother's going to move?
That's where you're going to go next.
And I had not even put the two together.
I always tell people, the reason I went to Wisconsin Law School is Gordon took me up there during the nice time of year.
The only good season in all of Madison.
So it was beautiful weather.
There was a U2 concert.
I thought this was normal weather.
I didn't realize it's normally either humid or freezing.
But I didn't figure that out until I got there.
So from Yale Divinity School, you go to Wisconsin.
What led to Wisconsin in particular?
Good.
So there, too.
So when I applied, I decided I want to do philosophy instead of theology.
And at that time, I'm still, I am a Christian theist.
And so I applied to all schools where there was at least one theistic philosopher, believing philosopher.
And at Wisconsin, it was a guy named Keith Yandel, who just recently passed away.
But also, Wisconsin was a really good sort of broad-based...
So it was a big department that had people covering almost everything and good people.
So whether you were interested in metaphysics or epistemology or philosophy of religion or political philosophy, you could do any of it at Wisconsin.
So that interested me too.
But it was because a Christian philosopher was there, who I knew of, and it was a good program and covered a lot.
That I decided to do Wisconsin.
I also, when I got to Wisconsin, I bought a bicycle.
And I thought, I'll go everywhere in my bicycle.
By December and January, of course, I'm trying to slug through the snow on my bicycle, and it was on Lake Monona.
The ice fishermen were laughing their heads off, watching this little grad student try to ride his bicycle through three feet of snow.
So I sort of discovered the hard way, too, what life in Wisconsin was like.
Now, in terms of fishing...
When did that love of fishing start?
Because, I mean, I remember just watching you run through the creek trying to chase some sort of trout or something.
And just, it was like, you know, watching that movie with Brad Pitt.
A River Runs Through It.
Yeah, it was like watching A River Runs Through It.
The way you loved and were drawn to it.
When did that first, because, you know, Viva shares that same affection.
When did that start?
Yeah.
So, when I was 11, I think it was.
Our grandfather, grandpa, took me and our cousin Jeremy fishing on a pond, on a little camp that he owned.
And I'd never, never fished before.
And we caught a ton of, like, sunfish, and then I think we caught one or two bass.
And to some extent, I fell in love with it right away.
But the time that really got me, and sort of got me interested in trout fishing especially, though I love all kinds of fishing, was...
My grandfather's foreman, Joe Morin, was a fly fisherman.
And he used to give me all his old fly fisherman magazines.
And as a kid in New Hampshire, I would go through these magazines looking at these beautiful pictures of trout.
Well, Joe Morin took me to a brook in New Hampton.
New Hampton, New Hampshire.
And he told me, go down that hill, and that's where the brook is, and there are brook trout in there.
So I walked down the hill.
I was probably 12 at this point.
I walked down the hill to this brook.
And it's tiny, right?
It's like, you know, 12 inches, 18 inches deep.
And I remember as a kid being totally disgusted.
I was like, there aren't any fish in here.
This is ridiculous.
And as I stepped out to the stream, the way I remember experiencing it, it was like little streaks of dark lightning.
In the stream, went every which direction.
And they were brook trout, wild brook trout.
And they had been right there, right?
They were camouflaged against the pebbles on the bottom of the stream.
And I was just, I was in awe.
I was astonished.
So I remember sitting down and thinking, all right, that was awesome.
I didn't catch any fish, but that was awesome.
So from then on, I was hooked.
And I fished in New Hampshire all the time.
And the love of it just grew and grew and grew.
And the thing I also love about it is I love getting away, of course, the drive.
So I have some friends who like to fish really close by, and I'm always like, eh, I like my drive because I like to drive out into the country.
I like to see the scenery, see the countryside on the way.
So I love the drive.
And then I love the places, especially where you find trout, are often really beautiful places, mountains, streams, and the like.
So I love everything about it.
I love the outdoors, but I also love the fish themselves.
I think fish are just beautiful.
They're amazing animals.
So yeah, that's one of the handful of real loves of my life, is fishing.
And I know that's true of you too, right?
I was going to say, Gordon, everyone in the chat is going nuts now because people ask me, why do you like fishing?
You're herding a fish and throwing something into water.
Unless someone has caught a fish and not by dropping a worm on a hook, it's more of an experience when you are using a lure or fly fishing and you're sort of not interfering but replicating nature and you're feeling that interruption of a fish striking your lure, biting your fly.
But the amazing thing, the experience of seeing fish in a river that You always looked at these rivers and thought they were desolate.
And then once you see what you've been missing, and once you appreciate, by the way, why fish are dark on the backs and light on the stomachs, so that they're invisible from both sides, you then realize nature's beautiful.
And yes, it hurts a fish when you put a hook in its mouth, but they eat other fish with spines that go into their throats as well.
They'll get over it.
And if you want to eat it, it's part of the food chain.
I mean, everything you said about it, I love it.
But the question is this.
Brook trout are notoriously difficult to catch.
So what is your personal best?
Oh, good.
So I have found, well, there are two quick stories.
So one is there was a brook in New Hampshire.
So the guy I mentioned to you at the diner who was independently wealthy, but you wouldn't have known it.
His name was Lyman Rice.
Everybody called him Limey.
And Limey knew when I had developed this passion for fishing and especially brook trout.
So now I'm probably 13, maybe 14. One day, Limey caught me and said, all right, I'm going to tell you about my favorite brook trout spot, but you can't tell anybody.
And he described to me, he says, it's one mile past, there's development there now, so I won't be giving anything away.
You know, it's one mile past the Moultonboro Airport, you turn left.
So I went to this spot, and I caught what are still some of the most beautiful brook trout I've ever seen.
But that was because it was a spot that wasn't very heavily fished and I was patient.
Recently, I found another spot in the Adirondacks.
I did a good bit of research, because I love wild brook trout, looking for a spot that had what they call heritage strain brook trout in New York.
And I stumbled on some old records, old articles, that talked about a particular pond.
And so it was probably four or five years ago now that I found it.
And this last year, I caught a brookie.
I didn't get to weigh it, but that was probably 16 or 17 inches.
And for a brook trout, that's a beautiful, nice, big, fat, and beautiful colors.
I love the colors on a brook trout.
That's what I really love.
So that's probably the biggest brook trout I've ever caught.
And it's in this Adirondack.
Pond, the name of which I won't mention right now.
One of the things, I'm not nearly as much into fishing, but what I did enjoy was the ice fishing that we did in Wisconsin.
Though, unfortunately, classic Wisconsin weather, it got a little warm and that ice house disappeared.
With a fine attached.
You get fined for that in Wisconsin.
Are there any bucket list items of places you want to fish that you haven't got a chance to yet?
Wow, good.
Well, since I love brook trout, some of the places up in Labrador, in Canada, there are lodges up there.
They have really huge, beautiful brook trout.
There are a couple places, and that would be one of them.
Those spots in Labrador that are really almost certainly the best brook trout fishing in the world.
So that would probably be top of the list.
Backwoods, Maine.
It has some incredible brook trout fishing as well.
And I really do like this sort of bushwhacking back into the wilderness, so that would be fun.
But really in Labrador, I sort of salivate over pictures once in a while.
I can just go look.
Huge brook trout.
And places that are only accessible by puddle hoppers, they call them.
You can drive so far, and you've got to only plane it in.
Gordon, my bucket list item, and I got to check it off.
When the world was still free, was sturgeon fishing in the Fraser River.
And we went sturgeon fishing.
And I went with my oldest daughter.
And we got up at like 5 in the morning to drive from Whistler to Lilluit, BC.
Couldn't remember the name of the place last live stream.
And I asked the guys, are we going to get skunked?
Because the last time I went deep sea fishing with my dad, we got skunked.
And the guy was like, you might get skunked, but very unlikely.
And we caught a 6-foot fish.
Within an hour.
And I was like, oh my god, well the day's done.
And the guy's like, well let's put this one back and get more.
We'll get more than this?
And we caught, we didn't get a 10 footer, but between a 6 footer and a 10 footer, no difference to me.
And it was amazing.
Catching these fish, prehistoric fish in a river, it's like God or a God-like entity.
Place them there as a joke.
And now you're just pulling out these 10-foot fish.
Yeah.
They're not as beautiful as brook trout.
They're not as delicate.
They are beasts, but they are pre-histored beasts.
That's fantastic.
We could do an entire fishing episode, which we might do one day.
Maybe we'll do a live stream fishing episode one day.
But let's bring it to the academia aspect.
You're teaching.
You're in academia.
Someone earlier on in the chat said, academia has been woke, for lack of a better word.
It's been tainted for decades now.
You've had the experience.
You've been teaching for how long now?
So I've been teaching for 21 years now.
Yeah, for 21 years.
I started out even a little before that at Wisconsin, but mostly as a teaching assistant.
But now 21 years.
Four years in Minnesota, 17 in upstate western New York.
So 21 years.
And you've noticed, I mean, we're not manufacturing this.
You've noticed an evolution?
Has it always been like this to varying degrees?
Or has it fallen off the deep end in recent times?
Good.
That's a good question.
The tone has definitely changed in recent times.
I mean, there's lots of evidence of that.
You can read the stories.
I mean, just in the last couple days, Rhodes College in Memphis.
Invited Peter Singer from Princeton to be on a panel talking about pandemic ethics.
Now, Peter Singer has some very controversial and, for some people, very offensive views.
A group of departments at Rhodes College, including, I think it was anthropology, sociology, a couple others, wrote a letter basically and said he needs to be uninvited.
He needs to not come here and speak.
Fortunately, there are some people and a growing number in academia who are speaking up about this.
And so a lot of people right away said, you can object to his views all you want, but it's contrary to academic freedom to be telling people that you're not going to allow them to speak.
And the philosophy department at Rhodes wrote a response.
But there have been a lot of cases, a whole lot of cases across academia of people being pretty much forced out of their jobs, shouted down, but beyond shouted down.
They've really, in some cases, been forced out.
So it is different.
The tone has changed.
Now, I have to admit that I might not be the best person to gauge, though.
How much things have changed exactly?
Because here's a confession.
So many years ago, someone in one of our other departments here wrote an op-ed in which he said, we need to have more ideological diversity on college campuses.
He's broadly conservative.
And he said it does a disservice to students if all faculty represent the same point of view.
This is probably 14, 15 years ago now.
And at that time, I was a pretty boilerplate progressive liberal.
So I wrote him and I explained to him, you know, that we had won all the arguments, liberals and progressives, and, you know, we don't employ flat earthers either.
So what was he thinking?
And we had a long exchange.
Well, within four or five years, maybe even less, I wrote back to him and said, I'd already apologized for being rude, but I wrote back to him and said, you know what, you were right and I was wrong.
I was really wrong.
Because I've discovered over the...
But that's why I say I might have been sort of oblivious to it a number of years ago.
Now I'm not.
And I've come to realize the Academy, more than any place else, needs diversity of opinion.
Because otherwise, no matter what your view is, what your politics are, if everybody in the Academy holds the same view, they don't get challenged, they don't get questioned, and they get dull and lazy and frankly kind of dumb.
So I like to tell even my progressive colleagues, you know, you guys should want there to be people around who challenge you because otherwise you're going to get lazy and slow and your work is not going to be good.
You need to be challenged.
But yeah, coming back to your question, I think things have changed quite a bit.
Have you ever thought about...
I mean, do you have access to that apology where you recognize the evolution or have you ever thought about publishing it if you do have access to it?
Might it be timely now?
Yeah.
Yeah.
You know, that's a good idea.
I should dig back through my old email and see if I still have it.
I've told plenty of people that story.
I've since had a number of conversations with that colleague about academia and politics.
But yeah, that's a good idea, I think.
I agree.
Because, as I say, so some more people are starting to speak up about this in the Academy.
But arguably, we still need to have more people arguing for that.
Well, we wrote a piece called Return to Wiegand Pier about the Orwellian experience that was happening in institutions of influence.
Could you talk about that and how much, you know, what Orwell has written has become?
Because people forget Orwell was mostly on the left.
He was a critic of statism from the left, a critic of famously said socialism would be fine if you could just get rid of all the socialists.
You know, I mean, he understood that the problem was the people, their true motivations and how statism was actually functioning.
But his ideals about how society could work never changed.
Yeah, yeah.
Let's see where to start.
So one thing I've definitely noticed, and I think this goes to the Road to Wigan Pier for sure, you know, in the Road to Wigan Pier, Orwell talks about going to a meeting of socialists.
And when he describes them, he's describing all upper middle class, professional class people.
And he says, these people are going to lead the socialist revolution?
That's never going to happen.
This is a disaster.
Let me add to that.
In 2018, the French economist Thomas Piketty published a study in which he showed that the demographics of parties on the left and right has completely flipped from the 1950s and 60s to today.
So in the 1960s, left-of-center parties, and this is in Europe and North America, in the 1960s, left-of-center parties were predominantly Low education, middle to low income people.
And right of center parties were predominantly high education, middle to upper income people.
Today that has completely reversed.
So that now, left of center parties are predominantly high education, middle to high income.
And right of center parties are predominantly lower education, middle to low income.
Consequently, the irony is, and you see this in academia for sure, frankly, the most woke people are all relatively upper-income professional class people.
So their concerns frequently don't extend to issues of socioeconomic class.
They extend little or none.
So I recently did write a colleague of mine who not long ago was in charge of the diversity events on campus.
And I said to this person, I said, you know, when you presented the list a few years ago of all the diversity events on campus, there were many events on racial diversity, many events on diversity of gender.
There was nothing on class, on socioeconomic class.
But I said, if there's one group that's the most underrepresented on college campuses today, it's...
Lower income and working class students.
If you look at the demographics, that's the truth.
So suffice it to say, I do find often that in academia, now more than ever, progressives are very concerned about issues of race, very concerned about issues of gender, but they have little or nothing to say about issues of class.
And if anything, there's a lot of disdain.
Now more than ever for working class and working poor people.
And that both contradicts some of their professed values.
And it also suggests that class is playing a role in this that isn't being acknowledged.
I mean, one other thing I find sort of striking, I'll just add to that, is if you go back to the 1980s, the people who wanted to police people's speech and activities.
Many of them were conservative.
They were on the right.
And remember that that's at a time when people on the right were relatively upper income and higher education.
Now, in 2021, a lot of the people who want to police people's speech and activities are on the left.
And lo and behold, the left is also relatively upper income and upper education.
So sometimes I'm tempted to say the moral of the story is that Wealthy, well-educated people like to police the speech of people beneath them on the social ladder.
And they've just changed which political side is doing it.
But socioeconomically, it's the same group.
It's the old Mark Twain expression is when you find yourself on the side of the majority, it's time to take a step back and reflect.
I brutalize it, but that's the idea of the same.
Now, hold on.
Oh, Robert, yeah, go ahead.
Yeah.
So is that what led to the book?
In other words, the conversations that are taking place, the ideas that are going on?
Yeah.
Describe that.
Good.
All right.
So I was thinking about writing a book on the theory of knowledge, and I had proposed a couple of ideas.
And this one occurred to me when, I should say, so I have close friends.
And I'll say family who are scattered all across the political spectrum from left to right today.
So I have close friends and family, some of whom I would describe as being at opposite ends of the political spectrum, but I'm very close to them.
Over the last five years, that's been pretty difficult to say the least, frankly.
But at one point it occurred to me that quite a few of these debates did involve Philosophical questions and philosophical assumptions.
And I thought, you know, I could write a book that was a dialogue between people who hold these opposing points of view.
And it would identify the philosophical disagreements that were at the bottom of these arguments.
And one reason I could write the book so easily is that I know these people.
So I can hear their voices in my head, right?
There were times when writing the book was really easy because I thought, I know exactly what this person would say now, and I know exactly what the other person would say.
So what led to the book was the idea that this could be a work of applied philosophy that was relevant, relevant to issues that are being debated today, and also would help clarify.
Some of the fundamental disagreements in the debate so that whichever side you're coming from, you will learn something about what the other side thinks and why and where the disagreement is at bottom and how it's sometimes philosophical.
So that's what led to the idea.
And then when I pitched it, the editor said, yeah, I think that's a good idea.
And then it was over the course of about a year.
I sat down.
It was the COVID year, really, right?
I wrote this book in the course of the year.
Actually, Gordon, we never even got to this.
Do you have kids or no kids?
Two kids, 12 and 10. My daughter Molly is 12. Sorry, my son Simon is 12 and Molly is 10. And they're both autistic.
They're both on the autism spectrum.
Simon is, I would say, much more autistic.
Molly is more typical.
Yeah, I didn't know that at all, actually.
And I was only going to ask the question in terms of getting at the process of writing a book, in terms of sitting down for a year.
For anyone who has never written a book, what is that like?
Is it all consuming?
And then how do you manage it, let alone with two kids, but two special needs kids who presumably take a lot of effort?
Yeah.
You know, on that score, my wife Marnie really made that possible because once I got the book contract, Marnie said, you know, well, I'll make sure you get time to work on the book.
And so she would watch the kids, get help watching the kids, take care of things so that I could get time to write the book.
And that was during the year when our kids were home.
A whole bunch of the time.
It was crazy, crazy.
So she really made that possible.
She did a ton of work to help make that possible.
And other members of our extended family, her family, helped with that too.
So it is all consuming, but it's exciting.
It's really exciting.
And in this case, it was cathartic for me.
Because, you know, at bottom, in the midst of the last five years, I am someone who really wanted to sit down and have rational dialogue and discussion and debate.
And there was so much screaming and shouting and animosity that it was very cathartic for me to be able to sit down and say, here's what a rational debate and conversation on this would look like.
So it felt good.
It was just I could express ideas that I thought hadn't always been expressed out there.
So it was all-consuming, but it was a lot of fun.
It was an awful lot of fun.
Now you get into the topics of experts and conspiracies.
How do you discuss that in the book?
Good.
So let's start with experts.
So here is really a kind of philosophical problem.
If you are not yourself an expert in some area, then how can you tell, how can you know if someone else who claims to be an expert really is an expert or not?
Because they might not be, even if there's a community of them.
So here's an example I like to give my students.
Think back to the days during the plague, the bubonic plague, when the doctors were practicing bloodletting in order to treat the plague.
So a doctor would come and he would drain a lot of blood.
There had to be some guy over in the corner who said, I don't think that guy knows what he's doing.
And you have to imagine the people around him said, that guy has a degree from Oxford or the Sorbonne.
Who are you to question him?
Turns out that guy was right, right?
All right, but so here's a hard question.
How do you know, if you're not an expert in an area, who the experts are?
And it turns out that it's harder to answer than you might think, because some answers that are very appealing turn out to be circular.
So, for example, suppose you say, look, they have credentials, right?
These people have degrees, PhDs, MDs, they publish articles.
Well, here's the problem with that argument.
All of those credentials are just more opinions of alleged experts.
So if the question is, how do I know who the experts are?
Appealing to credentials is just assuming exactly what I want an answer to.
And then if you add that there's such a thing as groupthink, right?
And people can influence each other in such a way that they warp the opinion of the group.
You have a really hard problem.
And that leads into...
I think one of the themes of the book, which is knowledge is a collective social enterprise, and the dissemination of knowledge is definitely a social enterprise.
When social trust breaks down, when some people have reason to doubt the experts, the transmission of knowledge becomes difficult or even impossible.
And people can have good reasons for doubting alleged experts, right?
Especially if they have reason to think those people have values that they don't share and that they're politically motivated.
Then the transmission of knowledge breaks down.
So it's a matter of trust.
It comes down to it needs to be reasonable for non-experts to trust experts.
And under certain political conditions, it can stop being reasonable, and that's a problem.
Now, do you think, to what degree do you think that our willingness to be skeptical of someone just because of credentials or pedigree or resume and the rest, that the willingness to go into why that, you explained why that's intellectually and rationally and philosophically actually the sensible approach.
Do you think our life experience between...
Having, at a young age, religious authority figures that proved unreliable narrators of truth and seeing licensure disadvantage someone, our father, for no good cause.
How much do you think that influenced or shaped our skepticism that just because somebody says, oh, I'm an authority figure that we should defer to them?
Oh, I think it definitely did.
I think it definitely did.
And having the experience of being in...
A sort of intellectual minority in other ways, too.
So when I was a religious believer, but in philosophy departments, at times the majority of the people were completely dismissive of religious belief.
And at times in ways that were just not fully justified rationally, whatever your view.
So that played a role, too.
But definitely, I think, if you come from the wrong side of the tracks in one way or another, And there are lots of different ways of doing that.
Then you're just more likely to question the people who think they know best.
So I think it definitely played a role.
You know, this semester I'm teaching ancient Greek philosophy for the first time in many years.
And reading the Apology of Socrates when he's on trial.
I was really struck by something Socrates says.
So Socrates says, I went around and I examined all the people who are supposed to have the most knowledge, including the politicians, the poets, who are sort of the religious leaders of the day, and what he calls the craftsmen.
And he says none of them knew as much as they thought they did.
But he also says, the people who had the reputation for having the most knowledge They turned out to have the least.
And the people who are believed to have the least knowledge, I actually think some of them had the most.
And Socrates is saying this in 399 BC, right?
So in one way, I thought, boy, some things maybe haven't changed much.
Because in Socrates' own day, he's saying, a lot of the people who...
They themselves think they know the most, and other people think they know the most.
I actually think they know the least.
I was really struck by that.
So in a way, I think it's not a new problem.
Well, it's the old expression.
I forget who said it, but being an expert means knowing more and more about less and less on the one hand.
But then, speaking of ancient Greek philosophy, and I just had to double-check who it was.
It was Aristotle.
And, you know, the expert issue seems to go back to trust in that it's ethos, ethics are good character, logos, logic, and pathos, emotion.
And the idea that, look, I'm not a liar, but I can pick out a liar.
And I've never done heroin, but I know that, you know, it's bad type thing.
And so I don't need to be an expert in order to know who I would qualify as being one that I would trust.
And it would come through the process of, you know, discussing, questioning.
And then coming to my own conclusions, which I guess in court is what a judge does after a voir dire to determine who is and who is not an expert.
But in today's day and age, I mean, we're seeing a whole different level as to who are experts and the deference we as the plebs have to place in the opinion of experts.
How is contemporary events, how are contemporary events factoring into your current education, your current teaching of 3,000-year-old stuff?
Yeah, good.
So I often just try to let students draw the inference for themselves, even when it might be pretty obvious what it is.
And in part, that's because I find that if you try to beat them over the head with something, they're resistant and resentful.
And of course, in a way, I think they should be.
I'm glad they are.
But it definitely has shaped what I teach and what I think is important.
And in a couple ways.
One, I do think that viewpoint diversity is really important.
I think students should get exposed to a variety of views.
And I think that's more important than ever.
So I more than ever try to make sure that a variety of points of view are included.
In every course I teach, so that students really have to think whatever view they're coming from.
I also think that just learning to reason well is more important than ever.
There's a lot of resorting nowadays, and probably no surprise, my students are 18 to 22-year-old people, right?
And so falling back on their emotions comes pretty quickly and easily.
But consequently, I think it's maybe more important than ever to refocus their attention on, all right, what are the reasons here?
What's the argument here?
Can you make an argument for the view you hold and what is it?
So I think that focus on sort of classical reasoning is more important than ever, and so I do a lot of it.
How much has your teaching style and teaching method changed over time?
I mean, you describe what your goal is to get people to think, not necessarily to have a certain opinion, but to learn how to think and to process their own assumptions, their own beliefs, to listen to other people, to engage them meaningfully, etc.
And, you know, you always get like...
High, high ratings.
You're like, you know, the top professor and all that jazz.
You get the Rate My Professor, which terrified professors initially.
I mean, for you, you're doing really, really well.
How did you learn that process?
And was that a learning process?
And how do you go about it these days?
Yeah, good.
So I find that to start with, the more enthusiastic I am about what I'm teaching, if I just let that come through.
A conversation.
You know, I sit on the desk in the front of the class and I just start talking about a philosophical problem.
And I tell them why I find it fascinating, why I find it interesting.
That usually, it's infectious.
I mean, students really get interested if they see that you're interested.
And then from there, I think what's been hard to learn is how to balance lecturing.
Enough that students get the information and concepts they need with creating space for them to think for themselves and make mistakes in their reasoning and speak and speak out.
So that's always a struggle, but over time I've learned how to give them space.
And let them think out loud.
Let them make mistakes.
That's the hard part sometimes.
All of us have to make mistakes to learn.
And when you're teaching somebody philosophy, when they make an inference that really is fallacious, it's not a good inference, sometimes you want to just jump in and say, okay, you stop and I'll do this for you.
And that's a terrible idea.
You got to let them do it themselves.
But over time, I've learned to sort of spend half the time lecturing and then the other half the time ask them questions.
And I usually try to gauge the class and then push back the other way.
That has been interesting because, for example, probably 15 years ago, when I would teach philosophy of religion, and we're in western New York, so most of our students come from suburban and rural.
Sometimes urban, but suburban and rural western New York.
Fifteen years ago, when I taught philosophy of religion, all the students in the class would be religious believers.
And so I would push back the other way, right?
I would press skeptical arguments and skeptical questions.
And then, maybe ten years later, I was doing this, and I slowly figured out that now, half or even sometimes two-thirds, Of my students were total religious skeptics.
And so once I figured that out, I start pushing the other way, right?
Well, here are the theistic arguments that you should think about.
So what I really try to do is figure out whichever point of view the students are coming from.
In order to make them think, I try to push the opposing argument so that they have to think about it.
And whatever conclusion they come to, they'll be better thinkers after they do that.
Yeah.
Now, how much did that public speaking come from?
I mean, I remember viscerally when I was young watching you as I think you were a seventh grader in a play and just being fascinated by all of it and the theater performance and the rest.
But I wasn't sure where did that public performance, public speaking come about in the family?
Where did that start?
How do you remember?
Boy, you know, what I remember is it was Brenda.
It was our older sister, Brenda, who first did that.
And she did both.
She did drama.
She acted in a number of plays.
And she did public speaking.
She gave speeches.
And she was really good at it.
She would, of course, you might know this, but she would go on to graduate first in her class from Wake Forest Law School.
Oh, yeah.
For those who don't know, my brother and I were at her graduation.
She didn't tell us.
That she'd won.
She had all these awards.
There were like 30, whatever it was, like 37 awards.
And she won like 30 of them.
So Gordon and I were sitting there like, we shouldn't just sit down.
We should just stand up.
Just stay standing.
It's going to be Brenda, Brenda, Brenda, Brenda.
She didn't tell anybody in advance that she'd won all these awards.
So she was the first one to start.
And so was it watching them that made you want to do it?
Yeah.
So watching her made me want to do it.
And so then, I think I did giving speeches first.
And the first ones I did as a kid were these little comedy sketches.
They were pre-written comedy sketches.
And then I did some acting.
I was in a play, a college play, they needed a kid.
And so I played a role.
Is that the one I saw you in?
That's probably right.
It was someone's senior project, senior thesis as a drama student.
They were looking around for someone to play the role, and I think that was when it was my schoolteacher who recommended me.
And then I did the Optimist Club oratory competition where I won a scholarship.
But it was really because Brenda did it first, and it wouldn't have come naturally to me in retrospect.
I'm very much an introvert.
I'm an introvert through and through.
So when I'm talking about what I love, when I'm doing philosophy, I get totally immersed in that.
And lose myself and love it.
But that's because I love what I'm talking about.
I love philosophy.
Now, looking back, I'm like, how did I get going doing acting in these speeches?
But I think it's because Brenda did it.
And watching Brenda, I thought, man, that's cool.
I want to do that.
Now that I think about it, I wonder how often...
We imitated older siblings, and then younger imitated the ones older than them.
I watched you guys, thought I could do it, signed up, didn't learn my speech until the night before, was trying to cram in the bathroom.
We had a bathroom with a hole in the middle of the floor, but that's another story.
You had to hop over the floor to get over to the bathtub.
I still remember trying to learn.
But I got up there and it was the old Temple Chapel.
And I guess I was 10, I think.
And then I saw the crowd.
And I lasted like 30 seconds and then went off the stage crying.
So I thought you guys all did it.
So this will be a no-brainer.
Not so much.
But then, you know, got in the habit of it after that.
But I don't remember.
I think I did it because you guys did it, not because somebody signed me up to do it.
But then, but because of you, mostly.
I mean, I did the debate, did the oratory, got in the habit of it, got, you know, that's where all that, because I don't think it would have come, if that first experience was any indicator, would not have come natural at all.
Yeah.
Now, debate.
Debate I loved.
I did intercollegiate debate in college for a year and a half and absolutely loved it.
I started this when I was a freshman and I didn't want to do any of my schoolwork because I just wanted to do debate.
And that probably also played a role in getting interested in philosophy.
It was fantastic.
You had to construct a case on each side and you would run both your affirmative case and negative case.
That I just found wonderful.
And then you did debate in high school and were really, really good at it.
But that, again, it was the content that sort of really sucked you in, making the arguments.
And, of course, that turned out to be what you did.
But debate, now that I think of debate, I loved even more.
than the drama or the speech.
It was good fun.
Well, it's interesting to think, like, debate versus performance, or, you know, performance versus acting, I guess, is the distinction.
Debate is not a performance in the acting sense.
It's a performance, but it's still what you believe in theory, unless you're, you know, playing devil's advocate.
But, Dr. Gordon and Robert, I think this might go for both of you.
I'm going to get to some Super Chats, and then I have the question of all questions.
Disclaimers be danged.
Can you please ask Gordon if he is familiar with Ian McGilchrist?
He connects neuroscience, philosophy, and religion.
I know the name, but that's all.
I don't know McGilchrist.
So it's Ian McGilchrist.
I will look that up because I don't know his work, though I've heard the name.
But I'll look that up.
That sounds really interesting.
I'm going to recommend it to my wife, who's a neuroscientist, for those of you out there in the crowd who already know that.
Glenn Schumann on Rumble Rants says, Dr. Barnes, thank you for your story.
Revealed a whole new side of your brother.
Stories of trauma that lead to, what's the word, overcoming the trauma.
Although I still don't, you know, I don't know.
You guys are living with a certain trauma that has shaped you as to who you are.
It is inspiring, but it's also, it's very...
It's life.
Life is not perfect.
DTTC says, would you consider the embrace of critical theory in our universities an epistemological crisis?
To quote Vash, a popular socialist YouTuber, it is more important to have the right political impact than to be right.
I guess this one goes for both of you.
Let's start with Dr. Gordon.
Yeah.
You know, when I said that I've changed my mind about everything in the course of my life, the truth is there's one thing I haven't.
And that's that I believe in objective truth when it comes to matters of fact.
I don't think truth is relative.
And I believe that there are rules of good reasoning and that those rules are reliable rules to follow.
So for that reason, Critical theory I find just corrosive because critical theory undermines rules of good reasoning.
It calls into question rules of good reasoning.
And once those are called into question, there's nothing to do by way of rational dialogue or debate.
It's a conversation stopper, literally.
So that's one issue, one area in which basically I agree.
I think critical theory is a bad idea for human knowledge and for the academy, for the sciences.
Now, there are different strands of critical theory, and they're not all the same.
But yes, I think, especially if we're going to have rational public dialogue and debate, we need to follow some basic rules of reasoning.
And critical theory really calls those into question.
I'll give you one example of this.
There's a woman, it was a while back now, several months ago maybe, a woman wrote a piece about how, she's an academic.
I believe she works in literary criticism, some area of literary criticism.
I can find the essay for you, but I don't remember the title.
She wrote an essay about how her partner was falsely accused of harassment.
It went on.
The accusation was anonymous.
This went on for, I think, a year.
And it did them a whole lot of damage.
Well, the woman writing the piece said this was all false.
It was all anonymous lies.
But in the essay, she still says, you know, I know that truth is subjective, but...
And I thought, after that...
How do you think that truth is subjective?
There's a fact of the matter you just said, that your partner was innocent.
But that's a product of critical theory, in a way, that there are no objectively valid rules of reasoning, no objective truth, and I think it's a bad idea.
Robert, you want to give us two cents on this, because it's going to be a good one?
Yeah, well, I mean, I think, I mean, no question about that.
I mean, it's, I mean, when I first got to Yale was probably my first, because like Macaulay, the religious schools we went to, you know, were not deconstructionists.
It was at Yale that it was introduced to this idea that truth isn't truth, that all cultures are relative.
A lot of these things are inherently contradictory.
I mean, they believe things that just cannot go together.
And it was startling to witness the scale of it.
And sort of introduced, it was one stage of political correctness.
And I mean, I guess, I mean, you had experienced both sides of it, because, you know, went to religious schools, where there was one, that was one version of political correctness, where certain ideas, I mean...
When we were young, independent Baptists is the tradition we grew up in.
That meant all the other Baptists were definitely going to hell.
And probably the independent Baptists down the street, they were definitely going to hell.
We knew what they were up to.
So, I mean, there was that kind of mindset.
No dancing, no drinking, no movies, no popular culture.
Though what's interesting is there was a seed of truth buried in all of that.
In that what religious fundamentalists were reacting to was a legitimate concern.
I don't share how they reacted to it entirely, but they're concerned that there was a cultural movement afoot in terms of pushing a very different indoctrination, not teaching people how to think.
Basically, have you been surprised at all that even the academy increasingly now second guesses what the Enlightenment taught us centuries before and that we thought was beyond debate?
Yeah.
Yeah, no, that's definitely.
And the reason is that, of course, it's ultimately self-defeating and self-refuting.
If you argue that there are not objectively valid rules of reasoning that are good rules of reasoning, then whatever view you hold, you can't support that view with reasons in a way that anyone else should recognize or accept.
But it also, you know, it does remind me sometimes, there are definitely similarities between the religious fundamentalism I grew up with and some of the really extreme radical movements that are taking over some sectors of society now.
What they have in common is that they undermine objectively good reasoning.
They refuse to recognize it, refuse to acknowledge it.
Say that it's not legitimate.
And when you try to argue, you're shut down with something about your perspective and their perspective.
And so I find myself thinking, all right, I've seen this before.
I know what this is.
It's a commitment that's not based on reason, and it's not subject to reason.
And especially in the academy.
I think that's potentially a very harmful, really bad thing.
Yeah.
Tell me if I'm on to something here, because until I met Robert, I never knew what critical race theory was.
I mean, I heard about it, read about it, never fully appreciated it.
And there's a difference between arguing from a premise versus arguing from a conclusion, because when you argue from a premise, you can still arrive at a conclusion that would contradict the premise.
Whereas it seems to me critical theory argues not from a premise but from a foregone conclusion.
And so all roads have to lead to that conclusion.
And if the road doesn't lead to that conclusion, the reason it doesn't lead there is because of the conclusion itself that if you disagree, speaking of critical race theory in particular, it's because you're racist.
So you get to that conclusion which confirms the institutionalized racism.
And if you don't confirm it, it's because you yourself are institutionalized racist.
It's the antithesis to basically what good reasoning, good logic is, is that you're not arguing from a premise, you're not arguing towards a conclusion, you're arguing from the conclusion, and all roads have to lead back to that conclusion.
Am I wrong?
Yeah, good.
That's definitely the way some people who endorse critical race theory argue.
I don't know if I'm in a position to say that all of them argue that way, but it's what some people call a Kafka trap.
In which no matter the theory that's applied to you says or implies that no matter what you say, it just confirms the theory.
So the standard example is, if I don't believe, say, that there is present tense systemic racism in America, suppose one holds that view, then rather than giving evidence to support the claim that there is, The response is, well, you're a white male, so obviously your opinion is tainted.
It's produced by an unreliable dysfunction of some sort.
And that's the problem with that way of arguing, is that it's a conversation stopper, right?
And the other thing that I find unfortunate about it is, there are people who would argue for something in that neighborhood.
Who argue rigorously with evidence and reasons.
So there's a philosopher at Harvard named Tommy Shelby who has a book called Dark Ghettos in which chapter after chapter he marshals empirical evidence and gives arguments that the situation of African Americans in the ghetto is unjust.
And Shelby, whether you agree with him or disagree with him on the argument, Shelby is giving evidence.
Shelby is giving arguments.
He's trying to persuade you.
And I often think to myself, you know, I know people who have their students read Robin DiAngelo, for example.
And I think to myself, one of the things that's unfortunate here is you should be having your students read Tommy Shelby, right?
If you want to read, you know, someone who Reasons in support of that kind of view.
There are people who do it and people who do it well.
And instead, you're sort of teaching this very manipulative, non-rational stuff.
So again, you know, it really does, even people on the progressive left.
An incredible disservice when they resort to these illiberal tactics.
And that's what they are.
They're illiberal tactics.
Rather than reason with you and persuade you, we're just going to shut you down and stop the conversation.
That harms them as much as anyone else.
When there are people out there trying to give reasons and arguments.
But yes, the Kafka trap has become a really common strategy now from people in some circles.
I like the term Kafka trap.
Yeah.
Have you been surprised at all?
There is this scholastic...
However it's phrased, a lot of studies and surveys that have been done over time that can't be replicated or reproduced, that have raised questions about what methodology went into them in the first place.
Any thoughts on that?
Yeah.
Well, this comes up in the book.
I think right in the first chapter, I talk about the replication crisis in psychology.
And yes, what happened was, it was a couple grad students, I think they were grad students at Princeton at the time, and they were statisticians.
They started to wonder if some of the methodology being used, especially in social psychology, was suspect.
And they knew the statistics.
I don't know the statistics.
But they thought, I really find these studies suspect.
So they said, you know what we should do?
We should get psychologists to try to replicate these experiments and see if they get the same results.
And so they replicated, I think it was 100.
Initially, I think it was 100 studies, and they got the same result in only 40 of them.
So 60% of them got different results.
And then they kept trying to replicate more and more, and more failed to replicate, to use the term that way.
So it became what's known as the replication crisis in psychology.
And some of these experiments were taken as gospel instructions.
Some of them were 20, 30, 40 years old, and they received wisdom.
And it became so bad that at one point, one of the experts in this field said, I have spent most of my life working on what's called ego depletion.
And I'm now not sure there's any such thing as ego depletion at all.
That's how serious and how bad it got.
Now, it's hotly debated what exactly happened and why.
But one of the things that was going on that's now been documented is that someone would do, say, 19 experiments, 19 studies.
And in 17 or 18 of them, You would get no significant result at all.
But in number 19, you got a significant result.
So what they do is take the 18 experiments that got no significant result, stick them in a drawer, and publish the one that got a significant result.
And it looks very flashy.
But that's because nobody knows that most of the time when you ran the experiment, you got nothing.
Until it was exposed.
It's also definitely true that the area that suffered from this the most was social psychology, which is an area in which people were arguing that people's situations shape their behavior much more than their character as individuals.
Suffice it to say that a lot of people would say it was somewhat politically motivated and that political motives were in fact Driving a lot of the research.
And that's another reason that scholars really need to be careful about letting political motives drive your research because it runs the risk of just being bad research.
Yeah, sort of classic motivated reasoning.
Now, one of the topics you get into that's almost like, particularly within the academy, but also other sort of professional classes that's kind of verboten, is that you're not supposed to talk about conspiracy theories.
But you get into it in the book.
Could you describe how you approach that topic?
Yeah, good.
Actually, there have been some philosophers in the last couple decades who have worked on conspiracy theories.
They're not very really well known, and it's sort of a small subfield, but there have been philosophers working on it, and at least a few of them have said some interesting things.
So in the book, what I try to do is first define what a conspiracy theory is.
And other philosophers have worked on this as well, and the definition that I have settled on, along with some of them, is that a conspiracy theory is a theory that explains some event in terms of a conspiracy, a group of actors acting in secret.
And it's an alternative to...
The received story, right?
So there's some official account that's either put forward by the people in authority or it's widely believed.
And it seems to be part of the definition of a conspiracy theory that it's always an alternative to some received account.
From there, the conversation between, it's between three characters.
One of them believes some so-called conspiracy theories.
Another one of the characters thinks that that's completely crazy and irrational.
And in the process, what comes out is that you might be able to have a certain intellectual vice at two different extremes.
You can be paranoid where you think that people are conspiring against you even when they're not.
But at the other extreme, you can also be naive, where you don't believe that people are conspiring often enough.
And one thing to keep in mind in that regard is, so everybody recognizes that there have been conspiracies, right?
Because they sometimes get exposed.
Well, someone who doesn't think you should ever believe a conspiracy theory, they must think that no one who commits a conspiracy ever gets away with it.
Because if you think that there have been conspiracies that people got away with, well, any theory that alleged such a conspiracy would be a conspiracy theory, right?
So the book sort of tries to argue that there's probably a balanced position in between the two extremes of being paranoid and being naive, and we should try to avoid both of those.
And people who say you should never, ever entertain a conspiracy theory, you could argue that they're being naive, perhaps.
Especially in light of the history of conspiracies that we know have happened.
Why would you think that none had ever happened that had not been detected?
I literally just tweeted this out today, and Robert and I have discussed it a couple of times in the past.
The same people right now telling you to trust the science are...
Telling you to place your faith in pharmaceutical companies that were, as recently as within the last year or two, sentenced to pay billions for knowingly hiding the fact that their products cause cancer and are telling you to trust a government that, as recently as the last two months, have revealed historical atrocities that they've committed against their own citizens.
And you're supposed to say, shut up and trust these two institutions right now.
And so, to question them makes you a heretic conspiracy theorist.
My criteria for identifying a conspiracy theory, a bona fide legit one, haven't read your book yet, Gordon, and I hope it's on Audible because I don't read so good anymore, is that the conspiracy theory has to be disprovable by nature.
It has to be fundamentally uncontradictable by nature.
It's one thing to have an alternative theory in my mind wouldn't be a conspiracy theory.
The conspiracy theory would be one that you could never disprove.
Because by its very nature, it is not disprovable.
So the presence of evidence confirms it.
The absence of evidence confirms it.
That would be my definition.
Everything else is just legit questioning.
Yeah.
I like that.
That makes a lot of sense.
Well, and in the philosophy of science, there's an idea that goes back to the philosopher Karl Popper that any good theory should be falsifiable.
That's Popper's criterion.
And that just means...
It should be possible in principle to refute it with evidence.
It sounds like that's your criterion for conspiracy theories.
Now, our little sister, Laura, is big on genealogy, but you share her passion.
What led to the interest in genealogy in particular?
Boy, that's good.
Well, of course, I just love history as part of it.
I'm a huge history fan.
I love history.
So part of it is being a history buff.
But then part of it is a curiosity about one's own origins, right?
Where did I come from?
And maybe it's that down deep, I really do believe that saying that things are the way they are because they got that way, right?
And so part of me always wants to know, how did things get this way?
And specifically with respect to me.
So part of it is just an application of my interest in history to my own history and family.
But it probably did ramp up when I discovered that our biological grandmother was Welsh, that she was a first-generation Welsh-American.
I think, first off, I was curious about that because I had no idea what Wales or the Welsh were.
So I thought, okay, what's that?
I vaguely heard of it.
And as I started reading and exploring, in part, I got more interested because I stumbled on all these good things, like poetry and music, that came from Wales.
And it was sort of incidental that I discovered them through genealogy in a way, but it just piqued my interest more.
So I discovered Dylan Thomas, and I started reading Dylan Thomas poetry and absolutely loved it.
And I discovered these Welsh male voice choirs, and I loved the music.
And then there was the language.
So in a way, my interest in genealogy and my discovery of...
This poetry and music and culture that I hadn't known about before, they sort of fed each other.
And the interest in each one would sort of pique the interest in the other.
So sometimes I think to myself, you know, I could have just as well discovered that my grandmother was Slovakian.
And if I started to discover some really great poetry and music and culture from Slovakia...
And I'm sure there is.
It would have made me more interested in Slovakia.
But as it was, it was Wales.
It's interesting.
We did a live stream with Jack Posobiec.
So I have not an unhealthy infatuation.
I love people's histories.
I love where their parents came from, their grandparents.
Not from the identity politics aspect of it, just from the appreciating the history aspect of it.
It was beautiful.
So we're talking to Jack.
His parents and grandparents probably came from the same part of Poland that my grandparents came from, from totally opposite ends of the spectrum of what were the politics of the day, but it helps understand and explain who people are today and how they came to be the way they are in a non-judgmental way.
Speaking of the judgmental part and the guilt by association, in today's social media age, everybody can find out pretty much everything about a person at the click of a few buttons.
Do you ever take any flack for Robert and his professional career and the people that he has represented?
So I keep a pretty low profile, right?
Until now.
So only with, you know, so there are some people who know Robert and Robert's work who know me.
And some of them, some friends I have.
Because as I say, I've got friends from all across the political spectrum.
Some of them definitely sort of cast aspersion and will give me some grief about it on occasion.
But for the most part, I keep a low profile.
Nobody knows who I am, right?
So I haven't been associated with Robert very much publicly.
But with people who do know Robert, yeah, there are times when it's been tough.
And especially in the last five years, the way things have changed with polarization.
People I know are really angry about politics these days, more than I can recall in my lifetime.
A little bit, but only a little bit, because generally I live in a different world from the one Robert does.
And so I haven't been associated with him as much.
But now it'll get interesting.
And Robert, have you taken flack in court because of anything Gordon has ever said?
No, no, no, no.
And we have, I mean...
Oldest sister is moderately conservative.
Second oldest sister is your more traditional liberal.
Third sister is in between, very independent.
Youngest sister is very independent.
So politics is across the board in the family and with most friends.
And it's only been really a few lefty.
What's fascinating is for all the time we spent...
Sort of perceived as more on the left.
That perception may have not always been accurate, but perceived as more on the left by our religious conservative folks we grew up with, because fundamentalism, my religious beliefs haven't changed much, but the fundamentalist architecture I'm not a fan of, and a lot of the leaders in that in particular.
I'm not an organized religion fan.
But a lot of them, even though we were critical of a lot of that, Never turned their back or got angry or said, oh, I'm going to unfriend you on Facebook or not associate or attack you personally.
It's been my friends on the left that have done it over the past five years, which has been educational.
I knew people from law school who unfriended me and everything else just because of Trump support.
And it's like, this is a politician.
You're going to unfriend someone over a politician.
This is kind of insane.
But it got that level of insanity because politics has become its own form of religion.
Beginning in...
I mean, it's not something I'm unfamiliar with.
They called me a heretic when I was 10. It was just a different group.
So, you know, it's just the name of the group change.
But yeah, I mean, it's...
I think a lot of people have experienced that.
Now, I think for the people that are on the left that have behaved that way...
It's counterproductive.
You're not going to persuade anybody by socially shaming and isolating them.
Instead, you're going to antagonize them.
And I think what Gordon does well is how do you teach people to think?
You show it by example.
An example is not being punitive, being socially shaming, being highly critical, telling them they're dumb, telling them they're bad people.
That's not a good way to persuade anybody.
Most people's political beliefs are based on different life experiences, different trusted sources of information that lead them to trust different parties, policies, and people.
It's not because they're either dumb or evil, outside of a very small minority of people.
And that's why people disagree with one another.
But we think of our politics as shaped by our conscience and our cognitive capabilities.
So if somebody disagrees with us, we assume, well, they must be brainwashed because they don't know the facts.
Or they must be stupid.
They can't think through things.
Or they must be evil.
They must be bad, bad intended.
That's really almost never true.
It's different sources of information that they trust.
Now, I still believe there's an objective truth out there.
But the fact that we're...
We see a different objective truth, doesn't deny it exists, but it also doesn't mean that their belief in it is out of bad cognitive capability or bad conscience.
You know, I've learned a lot in the last five years about politics and polarization, and it's been a hard, I'll be honest, for me, it's been a hard, hard five years, really hard.
And I think, you know, I reflected on this.
Several times over the last few years.
So I have one close friend, my wife's uncle, who is a libertarian, a lifelong libertarian.
And over the years, until fairly recently, I was economically on the far left.
So his name is Chuck.
Chuck and I have argued vigorously back and forth for almost 25 years now.
And there were times when I was more opposed to Chuck's view than probably any out there.
I thought he was completely wrong.
But Chuck and I just became better and better friends over the years.
Neither one of us would ever have thought of vilifying the other person, cutting the other person off, like it wouldn't have crossed our minds.
In the last five years, that's changed.
And one thing, not with Chuck.
Chuck and I are great friends.
But with other friends of mine, and one thing that I think I've figured out, maybe I'm wrong, people can correct me if I am, but one thing that changed with the election of Donald Trump for a lot of progressives was at least some of them felt dehumanized, they felt demeaned, and they felt an existential threat.
They perceived his election as dehumanizing them, especially if they were women, and as an attack on them as people.
And once someone feels that way, they go into a completely different mode.
They are not in a state of mind in which they want to reason with you anymore.
It's what you can call the politics of grievance or extreme grievance at that point.
And one of the really tragic things about it is that all dialogue and debate stop.
That's the end of it.
Someone who feels dehumanized and attacked personally in that sort of way, you're not going to be able to reason with that person.
They're not interested in reasoning with you anymore.
And so one of the things that has been hard for me in conversation with people in particular is to try to convey, I don't think everyone who voted for Donald Trump thinks what you think they think or feels the way you think they feel.
I don't think that they mean to dehumanize women or think anything like that.
But once people see each other that way, One of the worst things about it is rational conversation just ends, right?
You can't have any dialogue anymore.
And that is kind of a frightening thing.
So, you know, I met a woman a few years ago who had spent time in Spain doing research on the Spanish Civil War.
And she told me about how she was doing research on this little town in rural Spain.
And she said, I read a story that said one morning...
Everybody came out onto their doorstep, armed, ready to kill their neighbor.
And I thought, wow.
So, you know, sadly, a society can get to the point where they're that torn apart.
And that's just really, really tragic.
But yes, but I think a lot of people, especially on the progressive left, have gotten to that point.
They believe that they're being dehumanized.
And so every opposing view is now an existential threat to them personally.
And once you see opposing viewpoints as a personal attack, you're not going to reason with someone like that.
And that's not good.
Do what you've done your whole life.
Re-engage the rational thought process.
Re-invigorate the enlightenment principles that we learned from the last time we went down the dark ages.
What gives you faith in that?
Belief and trust in that?
Because I get that question a lot.
Like, hey, it's all going to hell.
Just take a boat and go someplace.
It's all finito.
And I always think that that's the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing people he did not exist.
The greatest trick any system pulls is convincing people that they can't effectively resist, whatever it is they may be resisting.
In this case, resisting the lack of rational dialogue, the lack of understanding other people.
Yeah.
I would have to say it's a little bit of the latter, that the alternatives are worse.
Enlightenment rationality is something that it makes sense to have doubts about whether it can succeed, but it's the only hope we've got, is sort of my feeling.
Reasoning and dialogue together and trying to reason well and dialogue is the best hope we've got.
But I do think there's evidence, if you look through the course of history, of humanity over time, Resolving our conflicts with reason.
We do sometimes, right?
We have succeeded sometimes through reason, right?
And we create documents like the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution that achieve an awful lot of reconciliation and enable us to live together peacefully.
So there are successes.
That have happened and that have involved reasoning, right?
So I think there are enough successes to give one reason for hope.
But I understand the doubters too.
I do.
There are days when it looks like reasoning is not going to win the day.
But I think it's also still the best way to respect human dignity, right?
So rather than browbeat someone...
I still think it's always more respectful to try to appeal to their reason if you can and hope that there's a chance they'll listen.
It might be a good question to end this on in the same vein.
I mean, going forward now, you are still professing.
You're still a teacher, professor in this environment.
How have you adapted your teaching and what is your plan going forward in order to navigate this environment while still trying to reach and Not shape, but at the very least influence the youth of the generation who are going to be the next leaders of this generation.
Yeah.
I think letting people know that I respect them as people, no matter what their view, and so they can feel free with me, whether they're students or colleagues, to tell me what they think, to give reasons for it and support it.
And I'm not going to...
Cut them off or try to harm them or vilify them in any way.
I think especially on college campuses with students, if we can work to create that environment more and more, people will feel safer to think, to think with an open mind.
So I think first and foremost, establishing a baseline of mutual respect where we say, you know what, we're all human beings and I'm going to respect all of you as human beings.
And that means no matter what your political opinions are, I think creating that environment is really, really important now, maybe more than anything else.
But then also starting to challenge people who try to impose some sort of orthodoxy.
I think increasingly they need to be challenged in order to reassert the importance of freedom of thought.
And freedom of speech, because freedom of thought is really, really vital to a democratic society.
So I will probably slowly, when I have the energy, start to challenge people a little bit more openly if I think they're trying to impose a rigid orthodoxy on people, because I think that's a bad idea.
Oh, you're on mute, Beaver.
You're still on mute, Viva.
Sorry.
I said you may have just jump-started or kick-started that process now by way of this, which might be the good intro into that world.
Phenomenal and fascinating, and thank you very much.
Robert, do you have a last question, a last comment?
No, I think we covered it good.
I think it's very important.
It's a matter of the human.
It's human.
It's what Gordon said.
It's about human dignity to respect freedom of thought, freedom of speech, and each person's right to think what they want to think.
Right now, in my view, that human dignity is being challenged in some other contexts, which YouTube doesn't allow us to discuss at all now, apparently, certain things.
I personally think Big Pharma has always been safe and wonderful, just to be clear for YouTube.
I wouldn't think they've been guilty of it.
Billions of dollars of crimes and fines just within the last year.
No, never.
I see big pharma and I think something equal to what the dear New York governor saw as a former deity.
But it's important to respect the individual's conscience.
And freedom of thought is about respecting humanity at a core level.
And I think he put it as well as it can be put.
And it's why it's a battle worth fighting for, no matter what your perspective is.
Yeah.
Phenomenal.
Stick around.
Robert, Gordon will say our proper goodbyes.
Everybody in the chat, thank you as always for the input, the feedback, the support.
It was wonderful and maybe we do it again.
Part 2.0.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
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