Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: I'm Scott Schiff with the Atlas Society. And we're very pleased to have Atlas society senior scholar professor Stephen Hicks with us to do an ask me anything about philosophy. So just request to speak if you have a question for him, and we'll get to as many of your questions as possible.
We also have some on standby. Steven, thanks so much for doing this.
[00:00:29] Speaker B: Thanks for having me on and hosting, Scott. Appreciate it.
[00:00:34] Speaker A: First question. This is from Thomas S. It says, Dr. Hicks, I enjoy your articles and videos and think you're doing amazing work. I was wondering what you thought of Alexander Dugan, especially his critique of the Enlightenment.
[00:00:51] Speaker B: Well, yeah, thanks for the praise built into the question.
And then immediately we go into very dark territory. So Alexander Dugan is a contemporary russian philosopher.
I believe he's around 60 years of age at this point. And for the last, say, 25, 30 years now, he's been publishing.
Most famous work was published around 2009 called the Fourth Political Theory.
And in that work, what he argues is that essentially old fashioned capitalism, old fashioned Marxism, old fashioned fascism, the big three contenders of the 20th century were all failures in various ways.
And so there's a fourth political theory that's necessary, and he tries to go on to articulate what that is.
That theory is a mixture of nationalism, kind of intense nationalism, with a strong integration of politics and state and more authoritarian politics. So it's been very friendly to Putin, and Putinism, as it's sometimes called. And that's led to some speculation, given Dugan's prominence, that he is so called Putin's brain. I think that's a little overstated. But nonetheless, he does have strong influence in those russian philosophical circles. And then the other side of it is a strong deference to the mystical eastern orthodox religious traditions and the idea that somehow politically, there should, of course, be a union of church and state in that particular form, and that somehow also Russians ethnically are special in accepting this mix, and that Russia has a kind of world historical mission to show the rest of the world the right way. Now, that's a short view. And of course, what that means is that from that perspective, the Enlightenment, which is what the question is about, is the big enemy from a Dugan perspective, because the Enlightenment is pro reason. It's not mystical, it's pro individual rights, it's not authoritarian, and it's not collectivistic in any such form and so forth. Now, beyond that.
So while I am a big fan of the Enlightenment, I think the Enlightenment is a project that had many great virtues and many great strengths. And they're still operative in our culture and some things that were areas of weakness that we're still working on.
But beyond that, I would say that Dugan is.
What I want to say is that if you push him in his politics, and I'll mean these phrases literally, he is a fascist in a philosophical clear definition of what fascism is. My evidence for that would be that if you look at one of his most famous essays published in the 1990s and 1997, this is a few years after the fall of the Soviet Union, and Russia is regrouping culturally, intellectually, politically, economically, and so forth. And Dugan rises to be one of the founders of one of the new political movements and political parties, which he forthrightly says is fascistic. So he self adopts the label fascism, and he writes a piece that's called I'm going by memory now, fascism, red, bloody and without limit or something like that.
That's a terrible translation of the title, but it has the word without limit, bloody and fascism in it. And what he does in that is say that essentially Marxism is dead. The liberal capital west is wrongheaded, and what needs to happen is a resurgence of fascism. And he identifies by name Benito Mussolini, the great italian fascist and political leader, as, so to speak, his intellectual hero and as the model for what needs to happen. And he's a little more reserved about it, but he makes strong connections and indications that what was going on in Germany in the 1920s and the 1930s was not so far off. A few reservations.
Dugan is not so explicitly racist, but he's thoroughly collectivistic. He's thoroughly ethno nationalistic all the way down.
So that's at the end of the 1990s. When you look at what he's writing twelve years later, he backs away a little bit more from the fascist label, but nothing really has changed. He still is in favor of all of the same principles and policies that traditional fascism is in favor of. And what has changed explicitly by the time we get to 2009, which is when the fourth political theory is published, is that the philosopher Martin Heidegger has risen in Dugan's rhetoric. And in his estimation, and what you find is Dugan explicitly saying that Martin Heidegger's philosophy is exactly the right philosophy needed to undergird this new fourth political theory, which is essentially a kind of fascism. And why this is also significant is that Martin Heidegger, in addition to being a philosopher of a certain sort, saw national socialism as the practical application of his political philosophy and his deeper philosophy as well.
And Heidegger joined the nazi party and was a gung ho member of the party, never recanted his belief in national socialism throughout the rest of his long life. So what we find this is kind of a cartoon now version reading of Dugan is that it is a rejuvenation of a fascist national socialist kind of political program undergirded by explicitly a heideggerian philosophy. And all of that is anti liberal, anti individualistic, anti reason, and more broadly speaking, anti enlightenment. So I do think that Dugan is right to see the enlightenment as his enemy. And I think all of those of us who are on the other side of the philosophical fence are exactly right to see Dugan and whatever influence he is having on current russian thinking as a serious problem.
[00:08:32] Speaker A: Great, detailed answer. That's fantastic. We want to invite people to join us if you have a question. We're actually very pleased to have with us now, Atlas Society founder David Kelly. Dr. Kelly, you have a question?
[00:08:49] Speaker B: I do, yes.
[00:08:50] Speaker C: Thank you, Stephen. And I want to pick up a little bit on what you just said, because Dugan is, would often be considered a conservative, not a leftist. And yet many of the postmodern themes that you talked about in your book explaining postmodernism seem to be operative. And I'm wondering if we shift the context to America.
Many of us have noticed that the right wing, so called the conservatives, have more or less abandoned the pre market stand and are now calling for nationalism and isolationism and some other things that are connected with it. And would you identify that as on the same path or the same cultural direction as Dugan, or independently of that, would you consider it postmodern? Is that the threat from that part of the so called political right, part of a postmodern generally threat?
[00:10:04] Speaker B: Yeah, that's an interesting question. So when I look at the political so called right in the United States, North America and so forth, or broadly speaking, conservatism, the big tent with all of the different constituent versions of conservatism that more or less held together in the 20th century is breaking apart. And it does seem that the most vigor and much of the momentum is going with those brands of conservatism that are much more collectivistically nationalistic, much more forthright in their religiosity and calling for an abandonment of the separation of church and state, much more explicitly hostile to individuals and individual rights and wanting to replace that with a kind of traditionalism and more group oriented rights. And then explicitly, when you read the intellectuals, they again are seeing the enlightenment as their enemy, and they are attacking explicitly the main philosophers of the Enlightenment going after John Locke and the others. But I would say that, yes, I would put them in the same broad area, but there are levels of degree just in that most of those conservatives are still Americans and are still kind of imbued with Americanism, which is still broadly individualistic and so on. But they are going down that same path. Now, the connection to postmodernism is an interesting one. So I think it is fair to say that a significant portion of that kind of conservatism could be labeled as a postmodernism of the right.
Postmodernism, first as a package or as a more or less integrated package of beliefs in philosophy, with then following ideological activism and so forth, came together on the left. In the that point, the so called right in North America was a mixture of libertarians and free market conservatives and various other ones.
And as that broke apart, many of the conservatives started to adopt postmodern themes, postmodern strategies, partly in kind of a fight fire with fire attitude. Since postmodernism is being so well used by the left, we have to adopt those same rhetorical and philosophical strategies in order to be effective.
Their belief that the kind of classically liberal enlightenment model wasn't working anymore.
So I think, partly, though, it's not only just a reaction to political trends, though I do think that the philosophical currents are deeper. So I think it is important to note that if we look at the postmodern thinkers, all of whom in the first couple of generations are on the left, so Michel Foucault, Jean Francois Leotard.
[00:13:35] Speaker D: Jacques Derry Dive, we just take those, the three french guys, all of them are very much on the far political left, coming out of Marxism, abandoning some elements of Marxism as they mature intellectually. But what is striking about all of them is that they explicitly are drawing on not only people like Karl Marx and Jean Jacques Rousseau, who are traditionally from the left, but they are also explicitly drawing on Martin Heidegger and Karl Schmidt and all big name german thinkers who are traditionally improperly put on the political right.
And so what is interesting is that there is a more basic illiberal, anti individualistic, anti enlightenment philosophy that is being formulated to a high level of sophistication in the generation of Friedrich Nietzsche and then in the generation of Spengler, in the generation of Heidegger. And that fractures and is animating and used by both what we think of as the illiberal left and the illiberal right. And what I read in the 1990s into our generation is that those thinkers, the underlying philosophical themes, are being used by both people whom we might think of as on the political right and.
[00:15:09] Speaker B: On the political left.
[00:15:11] Speaker D: And it becomes very hard to sort out who's a so called left thinker and a right thinker when you start looking at those themes. So I do think the way you put it is to say that there is something more fundamental at work.
There is a more general postmodernism that's anti rational, anti individualistic, anti liberal in a deep way, anti enlightenment, against what, more broadly speaking, would be a modern, liberal, individualistic, pro enlightenment philosophy. And that's where the deepest battle is.
Wow.
[00:15:48] Speaker C: Thank you, Stephen.
I don't want to take up too much time, but I'm moved to ask, is there any hope for us?
[00:15:58] Speaker D: I think so, yes.
One thing that I'm encouraged about just, is that just in the last. What are we, 2024 now? I would say in the last nine years, because I started to notice this around 2015, where it seemed like the postmoderns and their various offshoots were just having their way with much of intellectual life for about 20 years or so, and nobody was really paying attention, and they were capturing various institutions and solidifying themselves, their positions there. But then starting around 2015, people started to notice, and some first rate people started to say, look, there's something rotten in the state of Denmark, so to speak, and we need to start doing something about that.
[00:16:44] Speaker B: And then inside the academic world, there.
[00:16:47] Speaker D: Started to be some pushback. But then also people outside of the academic world started noticing what's going on in my schools, what's going on in political discourse. Why are journalists seemingly abandoning any pretensive objectivity and going for straight wokism and. And ideological language and so forth in various other cultural institutions. Now, these things take time, but I think we are now eight, nine, maybe ten years into the beginnings of a counter postmodern movement inside the academic world and outside the academic world, people getting up to speed and starting to push back in various ways with their money, with their feet, with building new institutions and so forth. So I'm encouraged by all of that. And I think that if we continue to have free and open and obviously sometimes ugly debates about all of these issues, I think the better positions will prevail.
And I think some of the institutions that are too far gone will die out, but we will replace them with better institutions. And I think it's hard to make these kinds of predictions, but I think we are at perhaps peak woke in the last couple of years or so. And we have a very good chance of turning things around. So I'm cautiously optimistic.
[00:18:20] Speaker C: Thank you, Stephen. I feel better already.
[00:18:24] Speaker A: Great.
Yeah, we're getting some typed in the chat while we're waiting. Just to push back a little bit.
Is it fair to characterize the american revolution as fighting fire with fire?
[00:18:42] Speaker D: Well, that metaphor is a great metaphor. So are you saying the american revolution as fighting the british imperial semi parliamentarian system as it was in the 1770s?
[00:18:58] Speaker B: Those two kinds of fire?
[00:18:59] Speaker D: Is that the parallel?
[00:19:01] Speaker A: Right.
[00:19:02] Speaker D: Okay.
Well, I would say no, because in that case, what was going on was Britain was drifting in a more imperial direction, monarchical direction, much more in the direction of having second class citizens in the colonies and not properly respecting. So it was not that the american revolutionaries were saying, we're going to do the same thing against you. We're going to treat you as second class citizens and not respect your rights and so forth. Instead, they are fighting in the name of other principles that they actually believe in and are trying to put in place. I think it's only fighting fire with fire if you use the same.
If the tactics and principles are the same on both sides. And I don't think that that's what was happening in the american revolution.
[00:19:56] Speaker A: Okay. All right, we'll save that.
Napoleon in the chat asks, wait, someone tried capitalism. When and where was that?
[00:20:09] Speaker D: All right, good rhetorical question.
Yes, I would say, yeah, there has been lots and lots of. Lots of capitalism, sometimes by default, sometimes in terms of principles and so forth. But you're right, Napoleon, if that's the moniker in question here, none of us are going to be satisfied with the amount of capitalism that has been tried. And when you start putting the measurements back in, so to speak, you find there's lots of regulations and controls and this, that and the other thing. So when you are doing the actual social science in your history, you do have to use the more or less. So the markets are more or less free in this area. Property rights are more or less respected here. But nonetheless, there is, when you scale out broad proof to saying that, by and large, the United States, Canada, the western world, was respectful of significant amounts of freedom, and other parts of the world were not respectful of different freedom.
[00:21:18] Speaker B: Some of them were old fashioned monarchies.
[00:21:20] Speaker D: Or old fashioned tribalisms, and some were much more explicitly fascist or socialist experiments that were going on.
Yes, it is appropriate to use the labels, but just making clear what level of abstraction you're operating at. Sure, that's good distinction.
[00:21:44] Speaker A: This is from sense. Certain.
I'm going to have to defer to you on the question, but what is the best strategy for remaining sense certain transcendental phenomenology or absolute phenomenology? It seems that there are benefits in absolute phenomenology. Adopting the Geist but stating it can only be moved with democratic consent, which demolishes the socialist, for which there is never a popular will.
[00:22:15] Speaker D: Wow.
Yes, okay, that's a complex question.
I would say that the core concept there is the concept of phenomenology. And if we are operating within a phenomenological philosophical framework, then I would back away from answering the rest of the question, because I don't think phenomenology is the right framework to operate within.
So if I am using phenomenology in the same sense that the questioner is, and I'm not going to presuppose that, but the concept of phenomenology philosophically comes out of a post kantian philosophical framework where Kant says there's a distinction between the numinal world and the phenomenal world, and the numinal world is reality as it really is, independently of our awareness of it. And the phenomenal world is the world as we are aware of it. And Kant wants to argue that we can't actually know the world as it really is. We can only know the apparent world.
[00:23:38] Speaker B: So to speak, inside our heads or.
[00:23:39] Speaker D: Inside of our consciousness. And then what happens is some philosophers then say, wow, conscious, basically, right, that there is this big split here, but we don't want to be stuck inside this phenomenological world or inside the world of phenomena. We want to know the way reality really is, so that they try various strategies to get outside the phenomenological world to the real world or the numinal world, and all of those projects are proceeding apace. And then others philosophers want to say, well, Kant is right. There is this distinction between numina and phenomenology or the phenomenological world, and there is no way to get outside of that duality or to bridge that gulf. So what we need to do is just accept that we are stuck, so to speak, inside the phenomenological world and deal with it and just carefully describe the phenomena.
[00:24:41] Speaker B: And since we're all stuck in the.
[00:24:44] Speaker D: Same phenomenological world, so to speak, try to get along with each other in various ways. And my sense that the second part of the questioner's question was in that latter part, where if we accept that we are in the phenomenological predicament, how can we all get along so to.
[00:25:04] Speaker B: Speak inside that predicament.
[00:25:06] Speaker D: Now, if that's an accurate reconstruction, then maybe there are some things to say about how we can do social philosophy independent of engaging with those metaphysical and epistemological issues. But I don't think that's the best framing for those questions.
[00:25:28] Speaker A: Great. And he's welcome to come up if he has other ones. We encourage anyone to raise your hand if you have questions on philosophy.
We had one from my modern Gault asking. You once had a lecture about socialism, asking the question whether it was utopian or scientific. Do you think there is a purely scientific method that can be used to discover or achieve a utopia?
[00:25:59] Speaker D: Again, a definitional issue here. If you use utopia as kind of a literary or thought experiment device, where built into, the idea is that you have no expectation that this is going to be a reality, you just want to imagine in some respect without asking questions about whether it's possible or not.
So then you are doing, so to speak, literary or philosophy as a kind of exercise in fantasy, whatever your values happen to be, then that way of doing philosophy or literature is unscientific because you are setting aside reality in the practical world from the beginning. If, by contrast, sometimes people use the word utopia this way, where utopia is a synonym for ideals or an ideal world, but you don't build into the idea that ideals are impossible.
[00:27:07] Speaker B: So for you, your utopia is your understanding of an ideal, but you think your ideals should be realizable. So you're taking your understanding of the way the world really is and trying to figure out the way the world works, and then on the basis of that, figuring out how you can improve it in accordance with realistic values, and that's your utopianism.
Then I would say, yes, science can be in the surface of your utopianism. So I would leave it at that for now.
[00:27:49] Speaker A: Great. We've got tom joining us. Tom, can you go ahead?
[00:27:55] Speaker E: Can you hear me okay?
[00:27:57] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:27:58] Speaker E: Okay, perfect. I got a Bluetooth mic. I don't know if it was going to work or not.
[00:28:02] Speaker A: I mute asking the question.
So.
[00:28:09] Speaker E: This is a little bit more structural than like contemporary and idea set versus idea set, something I never knew that there's.
Well, I didn't even know when the idea, the approach came in. I guess it was enlightenment ish or something, but it was something to do with the christian church.
Dalini, whatever last 2000 years has shifted towards the Trinitarian.
I don't even know how to say it, but I just want to ask if you could comment on it. I've been thinking about it from a pure math perspective, the way of approaching a whole or a monad, and to break it into subcomponents. The general simplistic approach is to divide it once and you get a duality, just conceptually. So you have utopian, dystopian, like, a lot of just general terms in language that form a or b, like black or white thinking or structure. But then the Trinitarian, I found an article on Jstore, and it was related to 16th century alchemist Latin book that had a guy had sort of treaded certain multiple schools of thought, and it talked about this duality versus trinitarian. I don't even know what the term is. Trinary, I guess. Can you talk to that? And I don't know if that links to anything closer or goes into sacred geometry, if you have any thoughts on that either.
[00:30:03] Speaker B: Well, again, there's a lot packed in there, and I think my sense is that I don't have very much to say about that.
Once one is inside a religious philosophical perspective, and then if one is trying to characterize one's religious metaphysics, I'm adding a new concept there, that your metaphysics should be dualistic or your metaphysics should be trinitarian.
I think that subsubate is not something that I have any particular expertise or knowledge in.
And then another part of that had to do with alchemy in the pre enlightenment era. I'm not sure how that would work in either. So I think I'm going to have to beg off on that question.
[00:31:02] Speaker A: Great. Thanks for that surf. You're up.
[00:31:07] Speaker F: Hey, guys.
Stephen, thanks for hosting this. I was unfamiliar with your work until a friend of mine clued me in to what you've been doing, and he mentioned that you were going to be doing this tonight. So I started listening, and I'm curious about your feelings regarding democracy generally and the new libertarian president of Argentina, who has been stirring things up quite a bit. But having to go into a system that exists already, a quote unquote democratic system, which I question that anyway, and then trying to bring libertarian ideals into that system in that country, seems to me is going to have a lot of. It's going to be quite an uphill battle. And I'm just curious what your sense is regarding the geopolitical aspect of that and democracy and libertarianism in general, if you are so inclined to enlighten us.
[00:32:16] Speaker D: Thank you.
[00:32:17] Speaker B: Yeah. All right. Another good complicated question was kind of timeless political principles and current events in Argentina about the concept of democracy. Democracy is used broadly and narrowly the broader sense is, say that sovereignty or the power in a culture, the political power, should rest with the people, broadly speaking. So you're talking about a self governing set of people. And usually that means that you don't have an aristocracy, some small group of people with the power over others, or a monarchy, a single individual with power over others. And in that sense, I am in favor of democracy. Democracy, though, often is used more specifically to speak about particular political mechanisms for deciding what the laws are going to be, who the government officers are going to be. And then in those cases, it's more tightly identified with voting. The idea then that every individual who is a citizen will have a vote and we will decide who's in office and what the policy is going to be by voting, and that anything that is voted upon and gets a majority or a supermajority, that's going to be the law. And in that particular, more specific understanding of democracy, I think it is a secondary virtue of political systems.
But that should not be fundamental. I think a proper, freedom oriented society is going to respect individuals as autonomous, self governing beings who have rights to their own life, their own liberty, their own property.
And when we come together to formulate rules that are going to govern all of us, or that we're all going to go by, that we will use voting for many of those. But there will be a limitation that whatever we vote upon is not going to violate the more fundamental individual rights of the citizens. So more fundamental then that narrower conception of democracy is a conception of rather a moral conception of individuals as rights bearing beings.
And those rights are fundamental. Now to turn to Malay, Javier Malay, the newly elected president of Argentina.
He is, by my estimation, yes, probably 80% to 90% libertarian and about maybe ten to 15. And this part is undetermined as yet more social conservative.
So there are some religious conservative elements in his personal beliefs, a certain stance with respect to abortion, that more aligns with conservative beliefs than standard libertarian beliefs as well. So I would say that, yes, it is fair to say that Javier Malay is a libertarian and that his professional training is as an economist. And I think he does have a first rate understanding of free market economics. He knows Hayek, Mises Friedman, all of those giants of free market economics, very well, and he's a very effective communicator of those principles. He also is, I think, well read more broadly speaking, in democratic, republican, classically liberal political philosophy. So the fact is that he will quote Ayn Rand, and he knows James Buchanan, the Nobel Prize winner of public choice economics. He knows Adam Smith and Thomas Jefferson and John Locke and so forth. I don't think his expertise is as strong in those areas, but he is well read in those areas. And for a practicing politician, I think astoundingly well read in those areas. Now then, the third part of your question then is to put those two together. Then to say he is, broadly speaking, a principled libertarian. But he's operating in Argentina, and its tradition of democracy more broadly causes problems for him, because for several generations now, Argentina, now I'm putting words in your mouth, Argentina has been a kind of soft, fascist regime. It's been peronist, and that's to say, going back to Juan Perrone and his successor, Eva Perrone, and the party that they bequeathed, the ruling party, which is democratic and republican, largely in form, if not so much in substance. But it has for several generations educated people to be dependent upon the state, to be much more collectivistic. It's bred a large kind of captive class that's dependent upon the government and a large, to put it bluntly, parasite class of bureaucrats who depend for their jobs, on government jobs, going all the way back to the 1920s, this party explicitly inspired by and seeing itself as a descendant from Mussolini and the fascist regime in Italy. So for several generations then, the culture has been imbued with anti libertarian ideals. And so Javier Malay and his team then do have a large educational battle to engage in if they are going to survive in the polls whenever the next election is. Now, I can't crystal ball gaze to say how well that's going to go. Many Argentinians are suffering a lot of pain right now. It's like the bad hangover from the drinking way too much the night before, actually, for many decades before, as the Argentinians have been doing, and all of that pain has to be endured. But my sense is that a significant number of Argentinians are on board and willing to bear the pain because they recognize the disaster that the country has fallen into given the previous multiple administrations failures.
I'm going to be going down to Argentina again next month, so I think I'll get better journalistically informed, but I would say I've been impressed with what Malay has achieved so far.
[00:39:51] Speaker A: Great.
[00:39:51] Speaker F: That was a very long and detailed answer, and I really appreciate that. I have another question, but I see somebody with a hand up, so it's okay for me to hang out up here. I'd like to talk to you once again. Thank you so much for that answer.
[00:40:03] Speaker B: I really appreciate it.
[00:40:05] Speaker A: Sure. Zagros, thanks for your patience.
[00:40:09] Speaker G: Thank you. Hello, gentlemen.
I suspect the questions are to be directed at Stefan, right?
[00:40:17] Speaker B: Please.
[00:40:18] Speaker G: All right. Hi, Stefan.
[00:40:20] Speaker B: Hi.
[00:40:21] Speaker G: I'm a stem undergrad at ASU with a strong interest in what's happening around the culture work, and I wanted to ask you about social constructivism and social constructivists.
In my understanding, these are individuals who do their best to deny, for example, evolutionary reasons for the emergence of capacities, such as the capacity for rape or genocide or colonizing one population or another, or whatever other human behavior exists in our populations.
And they seem to try and explain all these behaviors through socialization. If I understand correctly, that it's all because we were taught to do so by our parents, who were taught to do so by their parents, and so on. And I'm wondering if these individuals have an explanation as to the emergence, the ultimate emergence, of these phenomenon. How do they explain if it's all a product of socialization and societal teachings, et cetera, and culture? Where does these first instances of these perceived evil come from? How do they explain it? Is there like a first corrupted entity akin to perhaps an abrahamic Adam and Eve? Something like that? How do they explain it? Do you know?
[00:41:54] Speaker B: Yeah, that's a very good question. Social constructivism is just a more recent name for what in philosophy. For a long time, we've called environmental determinism. So the idea that human beings do not have a biological nature that drives them, that rather, human beings are more plastic or malleable, and that you can, through environmental forces, make them into pretty much whatever you want.
It's also a denial that human beings have a volitional capacity to direct their own thoughts, make their own decisions, make choices about their own actions that, rather, their capacity for thinking and so forth is also, from this perspective, driven or determined by environmental factors. Totally. So the way we standardly teach the debate in philosophy is to say, it's a three way contender. There are some who are strong biological determinists who will say, everything is biology.
Some who are strong environmental determinists who say, everything is the environment.
And then some who will try to mix those, of course. And then a third position is those who will say, yes, we are influenced by our environment.
We are probably determined, but also influenced to a large extent by our biology as well. But we do have a volitional capacity or an autonomous capacity for choice as well. Now, that's all by way of background, if you take the environmental determinist position, a subversion of that is to say that in the environment, the strongest or.
[00:43:58] Speaker D: The sole determining factors are social. So it's not that you're raised in the mountains or you're raised by the sea or raised in the desert, that there would be non social, environmental determining factors, but rather it is society. Your parents, your education, your broader culture, the language, the food, the dress that you are raised in, all of those cumulative make you what you are now. By that perspective, then the second part of your question comes up. How do they explain the original bad or the badnesses that emerge? And I think my answer to that question would be to say, if you are, strictly speaking, an environmental determinist or the subset, the social determinist or social constructivist, that you cannot use good and bad language coherently, because you cannot then say that something is really evil or really bad. Because the logic of your position is to say that everything that you believe, including what you believe, is good and bad, is something that just has been conditioned into you. So what you have to say is, well, I believe that such and such is bad or such and such is evil. But it's not objectively evil. It's just I happen to be raised to believe that certain things are bad and evil, and then counterfactually, if I happened to have been born and raised in different social circumstances, I would believe very different things, perhaps even contradictory things, to be bad or evil. So in this way, social constructivism implies that we have to do away with any sort of objective, normative language, in which case, the second part of your question, I think, becomes a non question. You're not saying, why are there such things as real evil? The question is this much weaker question, why do some people believe that certain other things are evil? So I'll pause there.
[00:46:31] Speaker B: Great.
[00:46:32] Speaker A: Thank you for that.
[00:46:33] Speaker G: Can I do a very quick follow up? Because I'm not sure I understood the answer.
[00:46:40] Speaker A: Go ahead.
[00:46:41] Speaker G: Or perhaps, thank you. So if it is the case that because of the tenets of their own beliefs, they shouldn't be questioning what is good or bad, because what I deem to be good is, after all, me having been socialized into believing that what I believe to be good is to be good.
That weaker question as to the emergence of that belief, though, how do they explain those, like who first made my most distant ancestor believe the things that he or she has believed?
[00:47:21] Speaker D: Yeah, I think that is a fair question to ask, and then I think just becomes a history question. They would, in a non normative way, just be trying to figure out what social circumstances or what environmental circumstance first caused someone to say, this is bad. And to start using good and bad language in a particular way.
But I don't think there's any philosophical bite to that question. It's just a question of history.
[00:47:59] Speaker A: I'd like to go to Steve next and just if know, try to save a few minutes for surf. Steve, welcome.
[00:48:10] Speaker H: Hey, thanks for having me. I just wanted to ask about sort of the revival of Kyle Schmidt's analysis on the political right in the west. And mainly his analysis that the political is defined by the friend enemy distinction and the sovereign being who has power in the state of the exception. I'm wondering if this political analysis is productive or what critiques you would have for it in modern politics. Thanks.
[00:48:39] Speaker D: Yeah, I think you're right that Carl Schmidt has been having a revival for the last 30 years or so.
He was consigned to the wilderness because of his complicity in the National Socialist or nazi regime in the.
He was extraordinarily influential on nazi legal theory and nazi political philosophy. But then he was rehabilitated by, of all things, postmodern thinkers on the left in the 1990s for the last, basically 30 years or so. And that, I think, makes sense because this goes back to David Kelly's earlier question. Both the postmodern left and the postmodern right do take the friend enemy distinction, me versus you, my group versus your group, as politically fundamental. So they have fundamentally a conflict understanding of the human condition and their politics.
[00:49:52] Speaker B: Comes out of that. The only difference then, between political right.
[00:49:56] Speaker D: And political left now is which groups do they see as more fundamental or which ones do they happen to be in favor of and see as the enemies?
[00:50:08] Speaker B: But there's no particular foundation to that.
[00:50:11] Speaker D: Now. I don't think that that is the right way at all to ground politics. Because if you take the friend enemy distinction as fundamental, what you are saying is that human relations are fundamentally conflictual, that there is no way to get past some people just being your enemies. And so you approach the world by saying, I happen to have a certain number of people who are my friends, whom I think as being my allies. And we are in mortal combat with the groups of individuals who are on the other side of whatever social circumstances.
[00:50:56] Speaker B: I find myself to be in.
[00:50:58] Speaker D: And we're never going to see those differences that are driving the conflict as resolvable. And of course, if you don't see them as resolvable, you're not going to try to resolvable. And so all of your politics just becomes adversarial conflict management. Now, I don't think that is true. I don't think that human relationships between individuals are necessarily fundamentally conflictual. I think human beings can learn to be rational. They can learn to be productive and creative individuals, such that the more natural thing then to them is to form positive sum or mutually beneficial or win win social relationships. So I grow up to be a philosopher and I value add in my own life, but then hopefully, I value adding to your life. Someone grows up to be a farmer, other people grow up to be computer programmers, other people grow up to be carpenters and so on. So they are all developing rational skill sets and they are productive individuals. And so my proper relationship with them is mutually beneficial. It's not that they are my enemies, fundamentally. So I think that with that understanding of what it's possible for human beings and proper for human beings, what we should do is be working toward a society where, to use this language, we're friends. And the kinds of things that have made people fundamental or apparently fundamental enemies across history.
Religious hatreds. Well, we can unlearn the bad ideas that lead people to have religious hatreds, to fight over resources, seeing resources as zero sum. Well, we can unlearn the things that lead us to see resources as zero sum and so forth. So identify all of the traditional problems that have put people at each other's throats and see those as solvable problems and then proceed to solve them.
[00:53:19] Speaker A: Great.
You got a quick one?
[00:53:25] Speaker F: Yeah, I don't know. I didn't know you guys had what the time limit was here. I wouldn't say it's quick, necessarily, but I am curious. This may be more of an economic question, so it may not apply here, but based on the money speech in Atlas Shrugged, the idea that some people can control money and therefore control people that get an unfair advantage. I'm curious if you have studied or know anything about bitcoin, something that I'm very interested in, and whether or not a free market money that I believe bitcoin represents could solve a lot of the problems inherent in parasitic governments that want to rule everybody with an iron fist, which we see all over the world and which we experienced for the last few years all over the world, unfortunately. I'm curious if you have a sense of money as it relates to our position in this world and whether or not you know anything about bitcoin or have an opinion about it.
[00:54:21] Speaker D: I think that's a great question. And money is a very philosophical tool that human beings have devised. So I think, as a philosopher, I can say a few things about it. And I am an amateur bitcoin enthusiast. I'm totally on board with my understanding of what bitcoin is about as an economic tool, as a business tool, trying to make money honest and using new technologies in order to be able to do so. And then the political component that you alluded to, money is a powerful tool that we use for enhancing human life. And there are people, of course, who want to control money precisely because it's such a powerful tool for their own political purposes and other agendas at work. So I do think that just as books and ideas should be free, that we should have free speech, that money also should be free. So it should be what ideas are circulating in the intellectual marketplace and what currencies we are using for exchange in the business market should also be free. So I'm opposed to fiat currency, which is basically a government monopoly over money and the money supply. I think that is philosophically and politically corrupt.
And so going in the other direction is apt. So I think of bitcoin and the other cryptocurrencies out there as a noble experiment.
What money is, is an abstract representation of wealth.
And so wealth has to be created. And then what we do is we devise tokens to try to measure and capture in a semi permanent form, something that enables us to do our accounting, enable us to store our wealth, enable more efficiently to trade our wealth with each other. And so, absolutely, money should be based on the underlying wealth that it is meant to represent.
Anything other than that is a kind of counterfeit or is a kind of fraud. And fiat currency is a giant step in that direction. And I see bitcoin and the other cryptocurrencies as trying to keep money tied to some sort of underlying representation of actual wealth, which I think is the honest way to go.
[00:57:15] Speaker F: Real quick.
I don't mean to drag it out. I just want you to be aware that cryptocurrencies and bitcoin are not the same. Bitcoin is on its own. I would encourage you to look at the differences because they're significant. Thank you.
[00:57:29] Speaker A: Had Michael sailors, our 2022 honoree, and we'll get back their videos. We had several panels, but I did want to get to BJ with the few moments we had left. If you've got a quick question there, BJ.
[00:57:45] Speaker I: Yeah. Good evening, everybody. And Steven, it's good to talk to you.
Yeah, I don't know if you. I tagged you in a tweet I posted to yourself and Jordan earlier today, and Jordan was gracious enough to send it out along with Scott Adams in Canada. Right now, we have this new proposed legislation, Bill C 63, which essentially is the criminalization of thought crimes and really concerning stuff that people can perceive you as a potential threat and you can be charged and prosecuted. And no joke, this is in the legislation up to a maximum of life imprisonment if you engage in digital hate crimes online, meaning you say things people don't like.
My question know, when we started your podcast, the very first episode was free speech. Why the philosophy matters. And I've had this conversation with the people that brought Douglas Murray in last week, and some people know I'm trying to get them to evolve in their process.
How do you recommend, based on all of your years in academia, how do you get people to evolve their thinking and to accept a more free speech framework? Because nowadays I talked to some people about free speech absolutism, and they look at me like I am from Mars and I'm trying to figure out how.
[00:59:38] Speaker B: I'm BJ.
[00:59:41] Speaker D: So why don't I take the final minute or two and respond to your very important question? Yeah, I've had a quick look at the legislation that Canada is currently putting in place about regulating online speech is what it is, and it's disgusting. And it's a total embarrassment for canadian.
[01:00:02] Speaker B: Intellectuals and canadian politicians that they are going down that road. Yes, of course, we have a problem with lots of nastiness online, but I think it's a fig leaf for a kind of authoritarian impulse that much of the intellectual and political class in Canada right now is on board with. And so they're using it to augment their power.
You're right. Free speech is in the doldrums in some prominent sectors in our cultures, and we are fighting an uphill battle in this current generation. There is no shortcut. It's really bad philosophy that's gotten us into this mess. So I think we just need to have better philosophy. I think most people, when you put it to them, they want to be able to think for themselves and be able to express their own views. You put the issue at that level to them. Most people are going to be on board, and so you have to leverage yourself up from that starting point.
[01:01:06] Speaker A: Great. Well, yeah. And keep fighting the good fight. BJ and Stephen, thank you so much for doing this. You had some really great answers. We had a lot of good questions and participation. Next week at 630, we're going to be back on spaces with senior fellow Rob Trozinski on the subject, can you be good without God? So should be a good morality play.
