Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: I'm Scott Schiff with the Atlas Society, and we are very pleased to have a Professor Stephen Hicks senior scholar to do an ask me anything on philosophy. I have questions from online sources and even some of my own, but we definitely encourage you to, you know, raise your hand in request to speak if you want to get in on the questions as people live, will get further first priority. Stephen, thanks so much for doing this.
[00:00:31] Speaker B: Pleasure, Scott.
[00:00:33] Speaker A: So let's just start right off the bat. We've got Jeff V. Saying it's been said for decades in the west we've focused on rights, but not on responsibilities. And does that explain our current predicament?
[00:00:52] Speaker B: Well, I'm not sure that the premise of the question is correct. I think in the west for years, decades, perhaps for centuries, the trend of modern, open, liberal, democratic, republican societies has been to emphasize that both of those are important and that they're connected. So if you are going to say we're a society based on individual rights, life, liberty, property, freedom of conscience and so forth, they're willing to take all of those seriously.
It's a very close corollary for the major theoreticians to also say that that comes with responsibilities.
Your life is your responsibility. It's your responsibility to make your own choices and to live with the consequences for good or bad. Or if you have freedom of conscience, your conscience is your responsibility to think things through and make up your own mind and so on. So I think the main line of modern rights thinking has been to see both of them connected and to emphasize that. Now, at the same time, I do think that the questioner is onto something, because calling it the main line of western thinking about rights doesn't mean that it has a monopoly on the field. There are lots of contenders.
I think there is, as the question suggests, one false alternative, or at least one diagnosis of how some people misbehave, is that they do want, for example, rights, but they don't want any responsibility. So there is a significant number of people who want to have everything, everything done for them. If they need anything or want anything, the expectation they have is someone is going to provide that for them, maybe government, right, and so on. So it is identifying a certain demographic of people who will say exactly that. And that is a problem demographic. And we do have to deal with the people, basically, who want to be freeloaders in society. I think another demographic, though, is the flip side of that, the other alternative that tends not to think of people as having rights. It's a little bit nervous about giving people too much freedom and saying, you can do whatever you want with your life. Because from their perspective, that seems to be like a kind of libertinism or a kind of anarchism and just, you know, do whatever you want. And that demographic typically is emphasizing, no, you have responsibilities responsibly. You need to be a serious person and know what you're supposed to be doing, do your duties, fulfill your roles and so forth. And so that side will definitely emphasize responsibility, but de emphasize the issue of rights. So as with quite a few things in philosophy and cultural battles, there is a three way debate. In this case, we have people who say, no, your rights and responsibilities are corollaries. They're joined at the hip and they both need each other, and it should be emphasized together. And those who want to split them in some way and emphasize rights without responsibilities or responsibilities without much talk about rights. So how's that for a start on that?
[00:04:44] Speaker A: That's good. It actually says segues into a question we got on the chat about rights from ls. It says, I will want to ask what is the best proof, evidence or argument that human rights are derived from nature and not from the supernatural or God?
[00:05:03] Speaker B: Yeah, well, yeah, this is a big debate between liberals or classical liberals and those of a more conservative, particularly religious conservative orientation.
To start on the negative side, often people who are committed to some form of religion, if they are philosophical about it, they start from a position of seeing the natural world as kind of empty or as not being able to provide what they want morally, cognitively, meaning of life in terms of meaning of life, and so on. And so to find those things, they say, well, we need to leave the natural world and find some sort of a supernatural grounding for it. So in this case, if you start from a kind of intuition that there is something important about individuals and that we should treat them with respect and perhaps even a principled respect for their own life, their own liberty, for property rights. But we don't see as religious people how we can get firm, grounded, universal principles in an imperfect natural world. Then we're going to want to make the move and say we need to have some sort of supernatural underwriting. So that's the one side of the position now then the other side to turn to the positive. If we're asking then, as naturalistic philosophers will do, what facts will give rise to the concept of rights?
Well, if we want to say that we're talking about individuals and we want to say, for example, that the right to liberty is a right or the right to property is a right, then the question would be, what facts about human beings and the world would we be pointing to? I think in this case, the facts that we would be starting with is to say, well, it is individuals who are real. So it's a fact that there are individuals. We have to establish the fact that individuals make choices.
And as choice making beings, they are moral agents. So we have to establish as a fact that they have moral agency.
Other facts we would have to establish is that for human beings to survive, for human beings to flourish, it's a fact that human beings have to undergo certain causal processes, engage in certain sorts of action.
That is a fact, for example, that human beings have a big brain and that they need to exercise it. They need to think, they need to discover knowledge.
They need to act on the basis of their knowledge or on the basis of their judgment.
They also are consumers. So once they've acted on the basis of their knowledge, produced things for that causal process to carry on, they need to have control over their production so they can consume it. So here we're just making a lot of fact claims about human beings. And then if those fact claims are true, if they are correct about what it is that human beings need to do in order to survive and stay alive and flourish, then we're in a position to extract a principle then to say, well, what we need to do when we are dealing with human beings and other human beings is respect those facts about them, that they need to be free agents who can think and act and produce and then consume their product. So that's the right way to treat human beings. And then that's exactly where the concept of rights come from. So it's a principled identification about how we need to treat each other in a social context. So the flip side of that would be to say, to put those points negatively, if there are rights, there are also wrongs. So if we kidnap each other or if we constrain each other and don't let each other act, if we let people make stuff, but then we just steal that stuff, well, that undercuts, as a matter of fact, people's capacity for living, and it sets them up for, you know, not only not flourishing, but possibly even death. So there are certain wrong ways on principle of treating other people.
And then the flip side of that is the right way, and then that's the doctrine of rights. How's that for a start?
[00:10:00] Speaker A: That's a very good answer. We could really peel back some layers there, but actually we've got some people up on stage. I think Justin was next. Justin, welcome.
[00:10:13] Speaker B: Hey, thanks for having me. Can you hear me? Yes. Hi, Justin. All right. Hey. Hey. Thanks, professor, for taking my question. I guess it's a two prong question.
What are your thoughts on St. Thomas Aquinas? Five pro proofs. And could you provide thoughts on Aquinas's influence on western philosophy, particularly political philosophy? Thank you. Yeah. Well, I like the second question a lot better than the first question, not to say that the first question isn't an important question. So one of the things that Thomas is famous for is the so called five proofs for the existence of God coming from his theologic or some of theologic middle part of the twelve hundreds, and on toward his death, as he was, as he was writing those. And it's a very nice collection of five of the most important arguments for the existence of God. I think if you do a thorough listing of the arguments for the existence of God, this is presupposing that you're not just accepting God on the basis of faith or tradition, that you're actually appealing to evidence and trying to reason your way to a conclusion that says, and therefore some kind of God like being must exist.
I think in my judgment, there are seven such arguments, and Thomas argues for five of them. What they all have in common is that they are an empirical approach to trying to prove the existence of God, that he always starts with a natural fact about the world. So it's a fact about the world that it exists. And then we ask the question, well, why do does it exist? And then we try to work our way to some explanations, or we will say it's a fact about the world, that things exist in cause and effect relationships. And so what explains cause and effect relationships? And that things exist in temporal relationships, this happens first, and then that happens. And so if we try then to reason our way back through time to, to whether there's a beginning of time or not, do we have a God who pops out at the end of that reasoning process? So the arguments are all in kind of an empirical tradition. And I think that's the best way to start doing philosophy, being philosophical. And he is committed to being rational, to laying the arguments out step by step, to making sure that all of the terms that are used in the argument are, are clearly defined, that they're not being used equivocally. And so on the basis of that, they are five of the arguments that have traditionally, if they're going to convince someone through reasoning to come to believe in the existence of God, the ones that have the most chance of doing so and have had the most historical influence in doing so. Now that said, I don't think any of the arguments works.
There's partly that there are subtle premises about the nature of space and time that one needs to get into, and the grounding of cause and effect as a principle and so forth. So all I can do, I think, at this point, without going into any particular argument, to say that I don't think the arguments work.
Nonetheless, I think it's important that any thoughtful person spend some time with each of those arguments. Let me do say just one side thing. One of the arguments, now that I think about it, I did an open college podcast episode on it, the so called design argument or the teleological argument. And there I laid out some of my criticisms of the argument. And I'm not saying that my criticisms are especially original kinds of criticisms that philosophers have raised toward the arguments, and not to do an appeal to authority, but the mainstream verdict of, I don't know if you take the top ten or 15 most famous and influential philosophers since Aquinas, the judgment of pretty much all of them has been that the arguments are a good try, but they don't really work. Now that said, again, I'm going to go out of my way to avoid any sort of appeal to authority. There are smart people who've been convinced by the arguments, and I do think that pretty much every young, thoughtful person who's thinking about religious issues should spend some time with the arguments and make up his or her own mind about them. Now, the second prong of your question about Aquinas's influence historically as an intellectual historian, I think of Aquinas as one of the great heroes of the western intellectual tradition.
And the reason for that is that when he is writing in the early part of the, sorry, the middle part of the twelve hundreds, the west, and what is then called Christendom is starting to waken up again.
I think there really were a series of centuries that were pretty dark, essentially from the collapse of the roman empire until about the year 1000 or so. And then around year 1000, so there's more trade that starts to pick up, people start to get a little more energized, productivity picks up. And one of the very exciting things is that a number of texts that had been lost to Europe were rediscovered and re imported into european intellectual life. Some of it came directly from crusades.
So in the far eastern part of the Mediterranean, some of it came from the other end of the Mediterranean, where the Islamic Arab had in Andalusia and Spain, established centers of learning.
And there was some interchange then with european christian intellectuals. Starting in, I want to say, the eleven hundreds or so. Look up the Toledo school of translators if you're interested in this. And so there's a big effort to translate a lot of the texts that are then available only in Arabic and some of the ancient languages into Latin.
And so Thomas Aquinas is then in the early twelve hundreds, the first genius intellect philosopher who's also open minded enough to take seriously some of these new texts. And what he is important is for saying that what we should be able to do is take Christianity, which he still thinks is fundamentally true, and that all of its doctrines, traditional doctrines that can and should be accepted on faith, pretty much all of them also can be proven by, by reason and mostly by empirical reasons. So a big part of his project is to show, on philosophical grounds, without starting with a dogmatic acceptance of faith, one can reach the same conclusions. And so that, in effect, the way the language is sometimes put, that God wrote two books, he wrote the book of Scripture, and you can study scripture and accept its truth on faith in order to get to the connection with God. But God also wrote the Book of Nature, and it's the natural philosophers who study the book of Nature. And by studying the book of nature properly, one can also get to God. And so faith and reason are in the Thomas system reconciled. And that's a hugely important move that opens up then the study of nature and proto scientific, proto empirical methods. And as a result of that, I think much of what we call the intellectual achievements of the Renaissance start to materialize in the subsequent centuries. All right, that's another. Yeah, hugely good question. And just to start on an answer to it.
[00:19:25] Speaker A: Great. Yeah, I love the history stuff. Justin, do you have a quick follow up?
[00:19:30] Speaker B: Well, I just wanted to say thank you and it's very interesting. Thanks. Thanks.
[00:19:35] Speaker A: Great. Anyone that has a question for Professor Hicks, feel free to request to speak, but in the meantime, we'll go to JP. JP, thanks for your patience.
[00:19:46] Speaker C: Oh, thank you.
[00:19:47] Speaker B: Thank you, Scott.
[00:19:48] Speaker C: It's so nice to hear you back.
My question is, what would be an objectivist's assessment of antitrust law and the effects that it has had in economies and free markets? Thank you.
[00:20:10] Speaker B: Okay, well, let me on that, give you an informed amateur answer to the, to the question. I think that is a question that requires for the best answer someone who's a professional economist, but also someone who knows public, public policy.
But I think there's enough that philosophical, particularly evaluative things that go into antitrust to say at least a few general things. So the basic idea of antitrust is the idea of monopolies and monopolies allegedly arising in a free market. And that if those monopolies arise in a free market, they have the effect of corrupting the free market.
The free market is supposed to be a win win for consumers and the businesses they do trade with. And it's also supposed to be an overall win win, even among the competitors, if they have a fair, competitive playing field. And the idea of the arising of monopolies in a free market is that both of those get subverted by the monopoly, that it's able to exert a certain kind of economic power, and that that can only be corrected by government intervention in the economy to break up the monopoly or to mandate price price issues, not allow it to set monopoly prices and so forth. So now, my informed amateur view on this from some study of business history is that I don't think there are any cases in free markets of monopolies arising that have those negative effects that are alleged to occur. There are companies that develop a large market share, but what happens is in the developing of their large market share is that they are competing well. They're not breaking any laws, they're not introducing force into the equation. And typically they acquire the large market share by serving the customers well, by improving quality, improving quantity, lowering prices and so forth. So if you have a large market share, that is a reward for doing good in the marketplace. But typically what happens is the people who are in favor of antitrust take a large market share as on the face of it, something to be afraid of or something to worry about. And almost always they will say, well, yes, maybe Alcoa or maybe Microsoft or maybe Amazon has been doing a really good job serving the customers, providing better service, better quality, lowering prices and so forth. But we're afraid that in the future they might start doing bad things. And so in order to preempt those future things that might happen, then we are going to enact various kinds of antitrust laws. And I think that's coming from an ideologically based fear about large companies. And I think it's also something that is, I guess, to put it bluntly, immoral. You are punishing people not for things that they have done, but you're trying to punish things, people, for things that they might do in the future. And you don't punish people for things that they might do. The other thing that always makes me suspicious about antitrust laws is that the people who are in favor of antitrust laws with respect to companies operating in a more or less free market almost never seem to have any problem with government monopolies.
They are almost always in favor of, say, the US post office. And you say, well, it's got a monopoly of various sorts. And not only that, it's an inefficient monopoly in various ways. So therefore, the same logic says we should break up the US postal services monopoly. And the people who are pro antitrust, they will say, oh, no, no, no, we're in favor. We're in favor of the US postal service, and they just want to set it. Or if you set various other kinds of monopolies that the government is protecting, I don't know, something like the large market share that Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae have in the mortgage market, or the monopoly that the Federal Reserve has over the printing of currency, this, that, and the other thing. So you can just go through the list of lots of actual government supported monopolies, and the same people who are in favor of antitrust directed at the private sector have no problem with supporting those actual monopolies that are actually doing inefficiency and various sorts of damage. So my strong sense, without having researched this in detail or published on this, is that antitrust comes out of an ideological position that I think is suspect and probably wrong. If, in principle, advocates of antitrust have no problem with government monopolies, but they are quick to worry about monopolies or large market shares in the private sector, then I think that says more about their political philosophy than it does about their understanding of economics.
[00:26:02] Speaker C: So thank you. If I'm allowed a quick comeback, because I basically would.
So they're pretty much useless because they, as you stated in the beginning, they haven't worked ever once for anything that they would decide to do.
[00:26:23] Speaker B: Well, I don't know of any cases.
[00:26:26] Speaker C: Wow. Okay. Thank you.
[00:26:28] Speaker A: Yeah, great. Again, if you'd like to join us, you can just click request to speak and ask Professor Hicks a question. In the meantime, we have aura ora. Thanks for joining us.
You'll have to unmute for us to hear you.
[00:26:46] Speaker B: Hello. Thank you very much. Hello, professor.
A question. I hope it doesn't hit home too much. Do you consider objectivism a real or respectable school of philosophical thought in terms of depth, rigor, originality, and body of work by professional philosophers? Okay, yeah, good question.
My answer would be to the first part of that. Yes, it's highly respectable.
I respect it. And I've dedicated a significant amount of my career to writing about objectivist themes and making objectivist arguments and so forth.
With respect to depth, I think right now the body of objectivist work is uneven.
What rand left us was a sketch or an outline of a pretty full philosophical system. Some parts of that she worked out in greater detail than others. So I think she did a very good job in the meta ethics or the foundation of ethics. She did a very good job on issues of concept formation.
So I think that's the first two of your criteria.
The third one was whether things were worked out at an academic level systematically. There, I think it's still a work in progress. We have a relatively small number of objectivist intellectuals who are doing the philosophy at the first rank, as I would. Would say. And there's a huge amount that always needs to be done to work out a philosophy. It's more than the work of one or five, or even, I think, ten philosophers to work out. So, this being the first generation, and a bit after Rand's death, I think that still is a work in progress.
If I were to just add some details there.
Probably the biggest areas that do need work are in epistemology, partly because epistemology needs to work very closely with philosophy of mind.
And we're, I think, making good strides. But understanding human psychology and the cognitive elements of human psychology, it's still an early science. And the epistemology that we have in objectivism is a very good start, but it needs to keep up with the science there.
Then, more specifically, I would say if you think about the human cognition from bottom up, that we start with sensory awareness of the world, and it gets integrated into percepts, and then we start forming individual concepts, and then we start talking in sentences or propositions, and then we start putting those sentences or propositions into stories or narratives, and then constructing theories that are networks of whole bunch of propositions about the way the world works. So, from senses to perception, to concepts, to propositions, to narratives and to theories, we objectivists, collectively putting this all together, have sketched all of that out, and some parts of it are worked out in greater detail than others. But we don't yet really have a theory of propositions. We don't have a theory of narrative, particularly fictional narrative.
And we don't have a worked out theory of theories, so to speak, which, you know, the crown piece of that would be a robust understanding of scientific method, but that would require an account of how experimentation works, a philosophy of mathematics and so on. So I think objectivism has much to offer, and my hope is that this generation, the next generation of philosophers, will continue to do that work. Your fourth criterion, I think, was the one of originality.
And there, I think, on some things, objectivism is not especially original, that it is, broadly speaking, in the aristotelian tradition. So if you're doing the, the intellectual history, you would say, you know, here are these various claims that objectivism makes. Some of them you can find in, in Aristotle and in the aristotelian tradition on, in ethics, we find there are earlier kind of more naturalistic, more individualistic approaches. So the full theory of ethical egoism that objectivism answers, if you detail that out in terms of, say, 15 or 20 constituent important propositions, then several of them have been articulated by other philosophers in the previous history. In political philosophy, broadly speaking, objectivism is Lockean with some, some variations. So I think all of that, if you're interested in the intellectual history, would yield the conclusion that objectivism is unique and original. On.
I'm just making up a number right now off the top of my head, but I would say probably four or five important things, but then perhaps another ten or 15 important things in objectivism, you can find that is not original, but rather it's working within a tradition that's been established.
[00:33:14] Speaker A: I took the liberty of posting in the reply section, chapter five of David Kelly's truth and toleration, where he talks about that and in what ways. It's like Aristotle and the things that make it different.
[00:33:29] Speaker B: Okay, great.
[00:33:31] Speaker A: In the meantime, Jordan. Jordan, thanks for joining.
[00:33:37] Speaker B: Hello.
[00:33:39] Speaker D: I sent this message the other day on Facebook to Doctor Hicks, but he wasn't able to reply at the time.
In your book explaining post modernism, one of the core concepts of postmodernism that you mentioned is the idea that words only have meaning in relation to other words, and that therefore reality is all subjective and beholden to our collective narratives. And I'm wondering about the implications of this. If that were the case, which I don't really believe it to be, would it even be possible to properly program general artificial intelligence into a machine to the extent that it would be capable of accurately accurately manipulating the physical world around it?
[00:34:43] Speaker B: Okay, that's a very interesting question.
I think if we're talking about hardcore post modernism, they would not have an answer to that question, with its strong anti realism. And particularly in your question, you're emphasizing the linguistic element, where you see concepts as only internal and self referential, with no connection to an external reality. So that sort of hardcore postmodernism would not even be responsive to the rest of your question.
If you have a soft core postmodernism, if I can use that euphemism that's willing to say that there is such a thing as an external reality, and that, however imperfectly, perhaps through a glass darkly, our language has some sort of connection to it, then there would be some response that would be required by the postmoderns about the successes of AI, as you then go on to. Go on to describe. So if you want, then say, the AI program.
If we want to valorize that program and say, what does it require even to get AI off the grounds? Well, it requires that we are able to build computing machines in the first place. And the computing machines require that we have already a robust understanding of cause and effect and electrical systems and chemical engineering, and being able to develop all of the computing systems, and then to have a robust logic and a mathematical logic that enables us to develop all of the software, and that we have real, intentional beings who are human beings who are making these machines and designing the software. And then on the basis of certain.
I'm starting to, okay, how is this now? Better. Better. Okay, so then we have a whole scientific and technological explanation for what makes AI possible. And all of that requires a prior understanding that philosophically, we're dealing with the real world and manipulating the real world in various technological ways in order to get some results that we want, in this case, results that either mimic or duplicate human intelligence in some form. Now then, I think the import of your question, Jordan, then, is to say if we are going to be successful at that project, would the success of that project not therefore show that postmodernism, with its anti realism and totally internalist understanding of language and everything, is just no different narratives, and we can't say which ones are true or better than any other ones, and so on. Would that not kind of shunt that form of postmodernism off to the side? And I think that's correct. It would also, would it be more.
[00:38:02] Speaker D: Accurate to describe that level of postmodern thinking as radical subjectivism? I've also heard that term.
[00:38:12] Speaker B: Yeah, I think so. Typically, the way it goes is that postmoderns, when they are on their intellectual journey, they start off as kind of naive, small o objectivists. Then they encounter the various skeptical arguments that can be marshaled against objectivism or some sort of cognitive realism, and they retreat to a kind of subjectivism. They start then to say, it's the subject that then is much more important than any sort of objective source for information. So they become subjective. And then if you add the adjective radical subjective, the further you go down that road, the more you're going to say it's all subjective. And so all of reality is a subjective product of some sort, and objectivity drops out of the picture entirely. Now, when you get to that point, though, most of the sophisticated postmoderns will say we need to change the terminology, that we have to stop talking about subjectivism, because to define subjectivism is already to define it against objectivism and that duality or that binary they want to then say makes no sense. Once you've reached the radically radical subjectivist conclusion, you can't even make sense of a distinction between a so called objective world and a subjective world. So that language from their perspective, starts to become meaningless. And you need to introduce some other terminology to try to describe what you are, your understanding of whatever artificial. I can't even say artificial reality or virtual reality because all of those have to be exploded as well. So you end up introducing other terminology to talk around your position without relying on any of those, what they see as false initial binaries.
[00:40:17] Speaker A: Great.
Let's go to LS next.
[00:40:20] Speaker B: Ls.
[00:40:21] Speaker A: Thanks for joining.
[00:40:24] Speaker E: Hey, guys, can you hear me?
[00:40:26] Speaker B: Yes. Hi, als.
[00:40:27] Speaker E: Thank you.
[00:40:28] Speaker B: Thank you.
[00:40:28] Speaker E: Thank you for taking my question.
A lot of talk amongst people who are kind of fighting this battle against the progressive postmodern woke ism that's going on in our universities and has captured other american and even european institutions.
And the argument going on amongst these people who are in agreement against this woke or who are against this woke ideology are arguing on this topic about the. What's been called the substitution hypothesis, or the God shaped hole in humans that can supposedly only be filled by an old timey religions or newfangled ones like New Age or Wicca or wokeism or Marxism.
I'm wondering if what's your thoughts on can a secular philosophy informed by enlightenment humanism and scientific naturalism fill that supposed God shaped hole?
[00:41:34] Speaker B: Yeah, that's a good question. I think you're right. That phrase and that general position has a lot of currency now, largely driven by, as you're suggesting, people noticing the value vacuum and the psychological problems of many people in the woke movement. And their suggestion then is to say, well, what they need is some sort of religion, and that religion can then solve their psychological problems, give them some actual meaning and so forth. So that's an important question to raise. Now, my view is that there's no God shaped hole out there, at least not in the general form that the people who use that phraseology.
I want to say that instead, what we have in the modern world, even the early 20th century world. With all of its problems and dislocations and so forth. Is a world that has been very successful. At providing meaningful lives for the vast majority of people. What we have really for the first time in human history.
Is people able to put together for themselves meaningful lives. They have enough freedom, they have enough resources, they have enough leisure time. To think about what they really want to do with their lives. To pursue the careers they want, to pursue the friendships, the marital relationships. To have the kind of family life. To pursue the entertainment lives that they want. And my view is, if you're doing the demographics, the majority. The significant majority of people in modern enlightenment society. Are living meaningful lives. Of course, they have all of the usual stresses and worries and so forth and challenges and sometimes failures that human beings have. But there never has been a time in human history. When so many people have had so much. And have lived such good, fulfilling lives. Now, that's just to identify one important demographic in our society. That is not to deny that there are lots of people who are experiencing something like what we might call a God shaped hole.
Now, if we start then drilling down into those people. There are a number of people who do feel a vacuum inside themselves. They do feel that their lives are empty. They do feel that the world is too big and too empty and too scary. And so as a result of that, they don't know what to do, and they don't know where to turn. And so they are in a somewhat desperate position. Now, how many such people there are in our society, I don't know. I think that would be a really interesting social science survey project for people to do. And I do think part of it has to do with. In modern society, there still are a significant number of people who, when they are young, they are raised religiously. And so the first philosophy, so to speak, their first value philosophy, their first understanding of what the meaning of life is, is a religious philosophy. And because of their upbringing, they come to absorb that quite deeply. And that shapes their lives. But because we live in the society that we do, with lots of questioning, lots of arguments, they become exposed to other positions. Their religious viewpoint is challenged. As young adults, they start to lose their faith. And I think it's a real psychological phenomenon. Then for people who have been raised religiously. But who are rational and open minded, then to lose their faith. And they are definitely going to go through a phase in their life where they experience life as having a God show shaped whole because they've been forced by their own thinking to not believe in God, but they have not yet found anything to replace that with. So I think it's probably true to say demographically that we have a lot of people who fit that description as well. I think another important demographic that this would be a little more inaccurately describing them. But people who have a God shaped whole, I'm going to just go to generalize it and say who are living in a value vacuum and don't know what to fill it is. And that's going to be a significant number of people who are products of our terrible schooling system in many cases. Not to say that there aren't some good schools out there, but we are graduating, or supposedly graduating every year. Millions of young people whose cognitive faculties, whose emotional resilience, whose physical skill set, whose sense of life is not at all preparing them for living in the world that we exist in.
They genuinely are under educated and in many cases miseducated. And they feel a skill vacuum. They feel a value vacuum. They don't know what to do with their lives. And even if they had some conception of what they could do with their lives, they feel inadequate to do so. And so these are people who are then, as young adults, put out into the world, but they are in a, in a value vacuum situation. Now, we do have a significant number of people. I don't know how many of those those people are, but I think the right way to approach that demographic is not to say what those people need is religion to fill that value vacuum. I think the right answer there is to say what those people need is education to build up their knowledge set, to build up their skillset, to build up their emotional resilience, actual education.
So that's a very good question. And again, that's just a sketch of beginning of an answer to it.
[00:47:59] Speaker E: Follow up question.
[00:48:00] Speaker A: Great.
Let's go to real JSP and then leave time for aura for follow up as well. RealJsp, thanks for joining.
[00:48:11] Speaker F: Thanks for having me.
Steven, James Lindsey recently mentioned a conversation he had with you about working on the nature of the individual.
And I spent a lot of time thinking about this, especially lately and in history, we see several examples of how people conceive of individuals and their relationship to groups such that it affects geopolitical issues. Like, for example, currently based on the interpretation of what happened in the Civil War, there are politicians who think that we don't any longer have a right of secession, but only a right of revolution, because the civil war settled the nature of the union of the entity of the United States, that the idea that goes from the United States are to the United States is and such that there's a type of unity amongst the nations that makes a type of separation that would be constituted in secession, to use Lincoln's term, tantamount to anarchy. And I'm wondering, how specifically important do you think a myriological answer to the nature of individuals is relevant to questions in politics about, say, you know, what I just laid out, or, like globalism versus, you know, nationalism, like, comes up with Dugan and his.
[00:49:49] Speaker B: Yeah, okay. Yeah.
I remember having a conversation with James Lindsay. We were both at a conference in London late last year, and part of the conversation was about how so many of the prevailing ideologies that are culturally and politically active are collectivist in their orientation. Either they have a collectivist understanding of human identity, linguistically or culturally, or they assume economically and politically or religiously that human beings are part of a collective and that there's not as prominent as we would like, a robust understanding of what individualism is in all of those dimensions, or individual agency is taken away and replaced by various forms of determinism. And so the argument that James and I were considering was then to say that if we're interested in all of these cultural and political battles, that we can't just fight them at the cultural and political level. We need to have a better individualistic philosophical framework. And I've been working on aspects of that. Objectivism is one of the great contributors to that project. And there are other elements of the overall individualism package that are being worked on, and I think well, by other philosophical approaches as well. But it's certainly a minority position among mainstream cultural activists and the prominent intellectuals of our generation. So it was identifying that. Lacuna, you then in the second and third part of your question, turn to specific issues about what does it mean then to say that the United States, to understand what it is for the United States to be a nation and whether it's like a collection of states or whether it is in some sense a unified individual in some way or other. And then the third part was the issue of internationalism, globalism, nationalism, and so forth. And all of those are actually both of those are important, applied individual issues. So let me just say one, just one thing about the latter part of that question. I'm going to skip over the issue about secession or not, and I'm going to give a cheap excuse, which is to say I was born canadian and grew up in Canada, which means all of my history was canadian history. And I didn't learn anything about american history until I came as an immigrant to the, to the country. So I am a little bit behind the curve on the details of particularly the civil war and all of the secession debates and so on there. So I cannot be the person who speaks to that. But let me just say about the issue of individualism in the context of nationalism and globalism, and this is again, only going to be just a part answer here.
If by globalism we mean the idea that somehow we need to have one world government that might be a bit strong, but to say some sort of supra national organizations that are bureaucratic and that they are going to try to make all of the world follow a centrally established set of laws in a somewhat conformist fashion. So that worry then, a kind of individualism, is a natural reaction against that. To say that what we want is to recognize that individuals differ and they, as a result of the choices they make, they make different cultural choices. And so a top down imposition is just the wrong way to go on lots and lots of issues. And also as a secondary point, that concentrating power in the hands of one monopoly type of government, or if you don't want to call it a government supranational institution, is to set up for abuses of power. And if we really are interested in protecting individuals and their rights, then what we should have is a number of different nations with different legal systems in some ways, and some freedom of exit and freedom of entry. So that if one part of the world or some countries go bad, people always have the option of escaping to another concentrated supernatural government is just too big of a big of a danger. But at the same time, I don't think that letting one's worries about that kind of, quote unquote, globalism endorses nationalism. And nationalism is another term that we have to be careful of. A lot of people, by nationalism, what they mean and what their actual practice just is to say, I happen to be born in a particular nation and I feel a kind of allegiance to my nation. I feel my identity is formed by being a member of this nation. I'm Spanish or I'm canadian, or I'm japanese or I'm nigerian or whatever I am. And I just want my nation to prevail. And I somewhat automatically think that my nation is better than other nations.
And I think that's the wrong way to think about nations. If one is going to be proud of one's nations, or give or one's nation, rather, or give allegiance to one's nation. That should be based on recognizing that your nation actually is committed to basically decent ways of doing its culture, that it has a basically decent legal framework, it has a basically decent political system, and that what you are giving your allegiance to is what you as an individual judge to be the right way of doing culture and the right way of doing politics. So that then is to say, you are in favor of your nation, but you're in favor of your nation ultimately, because it's respecting individuals their individual freedoms.
And so it's a moral nation in that particular respect. So in both of those cases, the worries about globalism and the worries about certain kinds of nationalism, both are getting cashed out. Ultimately, in terms of we want to protect individuals and their freedoms, individuals and their rights. Globalisms of certain sorts are a problem. Nationalisms of a certain sort are a problem. And the solution is having a proper theory of the individual and what those national and global institutions should be doing. Now, at the same time, I don't think there's that all of this can be sorted out purely philosophically. A lot of these issues turn on, I think, more fine grained judgments that political theorists and political scientists need to work out. Once you argue the premise or grant the premise that we do need to have governments to do certain things for us to protect our certain rights, I think it's then an open question about what levels of governments are going to be performing various services that we think governments properly can and should be doing. So what should be done at the local level, what should be done at the county level, at the state level, at the national level, at the international level, I think all of that is open and needs to be worked out not by philosophers, but by political scientists and so forth. So the idea, for example, that at the global level, we should have free trade and open trade so that goods and services can flow across national borders, well, that's going to be something that's at, so to speak, the globalist level or the international level. And we would properly chastise national level governments or state level governments that are interfering with free trade agreements that have been reached at the international level and various sorts of legal frameworks. I'm quite comfortable with saying that there can be international courts of justice for certain sorts of issues, particularly after wars have been prosecuted, rather than saying that only courts inside national jurisdictions. But that would need to be argued and so forth. So, very good question. But also very complicated.
[00:59:02] Speaker F: If I may, I was just going to say what do we have to do to get Jordan Peterson to have a question, or, I'm sorry, a discussion with you about Rand instead of, say, Michael Malice?
[00:59:15] Speaker B: Well, that's a good question. I don't know the answer to it.
[00:59:20] Speaker A: Thanks. Well, this has been a great session. I'm sorry, Aura. And ls we didn't have time to get back to you. But you know, we are going to come back here next month. You can always send Professor Hicks questions on social media as well. He does, you know, keep those. And so just, this was great. Thank you again so much for doing this. If you'd like to support our work with a tax free contribution, it's atlasesociety.org and we'll look forward to seeing you on the next.
[00:59:56] Speaker B: Thanks everyone, for the good questions. Had fun.
