Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hello, I'm Scott Schiff with the Atlas Society. We're very pleased to have Atlas Society senior scholar Stephen Hicks with us for an Ask me anything on philosophy.
I've got questions from social media, but we want to encourage live questions as well. If you have a question, you can click request to speak and we'll try to get to as many of you as possible.
Stephen, welcome. Thank you so much for doing this.
[00:00:29] Speaker B: Thanks for hosting, Scott.
[00:00:31] Speaker A: Absolutely.
While I'm getting people up from the audience, let me just ask you, there's this one that says, what do you say to those who say an Ayn Rand phase is just for adolescents?
[00:00:45] Speaker B: Well, I think that's usually comes from people in a snarky tone of voice.
I know lots of people will read Rand and be enthusiastic about her when they are younger, but then I think the divide comes in two ways. I think there are people who are thoughtful and they like Rand, they appreciate Rand, they see the power of her philosophy, but they are thoughtful people and they ask the dozens or hundreds of questions about philosophy and related issues that thoughtful people put to themselves. And, you know, in various ways they come to disagree with some element of objectivism, and so they go away. So they might have had what we call an Ayn Rand phase, and they still respect that phase, but they don't necessarily agree with objectivism anymore. But my sense is that the import of the question, when it comes from someone who's putting it in a snarky way, is something a little bit different than what they are usually saying is that Rand does not have a deep philosophy, which I don't think they really believe.
I think they're just playing some rhetorical games. But more often, my sense is that what happens to some people is that they start off when they are young and they're full of energy and they are idealistic and they are romantic in the sense of life as an adventure.
And the appeal of Rand to them, say, in their teen years or in their 20 years, was more of a sense of life attraction, not necessarily to diminish the intellectual part of it, but it was an overwhelmingly strong emotionalist response. But then as they got into their 20s and 30s, life gets harder, it gets more difficult. They started to become more pessimistic, more jaded, more cynical, more disappointed. And so from their perspective, it's not so much an intellectual disagreement with, with, with Rand, but that they feel themselves some extent to be ashamed of having been so romantic and idealistic when they are younger. So they, they feel like they've grown up. They're, they're realistic now. They see the world as it really is, rather than that silly juvenile or adolescent romanticism. So they are using that, I think, as a rhetorical weapon against people for whom life still is a romantic adventure. So they're still with Rand on that score. So lots of people disagree with Rand for lots of things. If people have intellectual disagreements, I can respect that and willingly enter into the argument with them. But usually the juvenile Ayn Rand phase thing makes me feel sorry for people. I get the sense that I'm dealing with someone for whom life is a disappointment and they're reacting that way.
[00:04:19] Speaker A: Good answer. I think I remember Obama saying something along those lines years ago.
Let's go to Fountainhead Forum. Thanks for joining.
[00:04:30] Speaker C: Hi, Steven, it's Chris Baker. This is a question that's been pondering, been on my mind a lot lately, and I wouldn't be bringing. And this is something I'm noticing with people that I think are pretty smart and they're good people. There's this attitude among some people who are more leaning to the right that any, for example, any organization that is not explicitly right wing will eventually go left wing. And they'll say things to me like, you know, nature abhors a vacuum. And basically they're using this as an argument against, you know, anything that would be considered libertarian or free market.
Basically this attitude that libertarianism, or true liberalism, if we want to call it that, has to go socialist. And I really don't know how to respond to these people, but it seems to becoming a very definitely a growing belief. There's even this group of people now who call themselves the post Libertarians.
One person, I won't mention names these. There's a growing number of people like this, and I'm just curious to know how do we respond to them, because I don't think a free society, I'd like to believe that we can have a truly free society and maintain that, but they seem to think that we can't. You know, and it's like, and it seems to be this attitude, well, you know, if my football team's not explicitly right wing, it'll go left wing, or if my bridge club isn't explicitly right wing, it'll go left wing. How do we respond to that?
[00:06:03] Speaker B: Okay, it sounds like there's a lot built into that. It sounds like there's almost like a full circle thing going on. There's that old cliche line about if you're not a Liberal in your 20s, there's something wrong with Your. With your heart. If you're not a conservative by the time you're 40, there's something wrong with your head. So that argument is often used by people who are conservative to say that there's a natural developmental point from starting with socialism but ending up in a conservative. And this sounds like it's going in a different direction than is to say, if you start from a libertarian perspective when you are a young person by the time you have finished maturing, that your libertarian way of thinking is going to take you into socialism. So it sounds like to me that if we go on that, then the natural progression is you're going to go from libertarianism to socialism to conservatism in some sense. But let me.
You. You mentioned along the way the phrase nature abhors a vacuum.
So the idea there then is, from this perspective, you're calling them, I don't know, post libertarian or whatever. Their view is that libertarianism is ultimately empty in some sense, that whatever its superficial appeals are, initially one comes to realize its emptiness, but that one can't stay in an empty place for very long. That's the nature of horse, a vacuum. So. So one then drops the libertarianism and goes for something that then provides or fills that vacuum with meaning, with principles, with something or other. And that socialism then is the candidate.
Is that a fair reconstruction? Chris?
[00:08:08] Speaker C: It's hard to say. You know, probably the leading person that I can think has been saying stuff like this is. I don't know if you've heard of Carl Benjamin or he goes by Sargon of Akkad There. There's a few other.
Buck Johnson of the Counterflow podcast. These people aren't. I. I think what does sometimes happen is people lose sight of what they're for and they become more and more focused on what they're against, which is always a very dangerous thing to do when you, when you become obsessed with the bad guy instead of, you know, trying to uphold the good.
[00:08:47] Speaker D: It's.
[00:08:47] Speaker C: But it's really.
I can show you some tweets that would explain it.
[00:08:52] Speaker B: Better yet, take that. I know then since you put a couple of names out there, I know Carl Benjamin, some.
[00:09:01] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:09:02] Speaker B: So in that particular case, my sense is that what happened is that we. The appeal of liberalism was strong.
I think in that case, it was more of a John Stuart Mill kind of liberalism.
And Mill, toward the end of his life, did make some compromises with some soft forms of socialism. So he might be arguing that if Mill went down that road, that's the natural thing for liberalism to do. But also a big part of it in the British context is that the British, as with many of the European nations right now, are struggling with issues of migration and immigration, both legal and illegal. And there has been a sense among a number of people there who are attracted to liberalism that it doesn't have an answer to issues of what they see as kind of uncontrolled immigration or mass migration, that it's empty in that sense, and that if liberalism is not able to solve that particular problem and robustly defend traditional classical liberalism, then it is going to be swamped. And so as a result of that, the only way to preserve the classical culture or the traditional culture of Western Europe, or more narrowly, Britain, is by abandoning liberalism and going to some sort of traditionalism or conservatism. And they do recognize that it's more of a.
Liberalism has failed. And we have to believe in something, even if that something is not grounded on anything better than. These are just the traditions of our region, and we like them. So, again, is something like that a fair reconstruction or in the territory.
[00:11:06] Speaker C: Yeah, that's a good way to put it. I mean, I would say they're becoming traditionalists or, you know, the big bad virus and the reaction to it drove a lot of people nuts.
You know, a lot of them, for example, are very much going into orthodox Christianity, people who used to be atheists, believe it or not. It's really. I'm trying to make sense of it, because if you can figure out what motivates people to leave, maybe you can also figure out what motivates people to come to your side in the first place.
[00:11:36] Speaker B: Yeah, well, there is another issue here that I think is more epistemological. That one of the things that has happened not only in Western Europe, but also in North America as people who were classical liberals in the John Locke or John Stuart Mill or Adam Smith sense, something in that area there, the liberal ethos and the liberal understanding of limited government and free markets and so forth was strong with them.
And a big part of that was the notion that we need to have a strong tolerance for differences of opinion, differences of lifestyle.
And for many, the grounding for tolerance was not that, you know, individuals, as a matter of fact, need to think for themselves and be able to act independently, that those are objective facts about the human condition, that by, you know, by the basic conditions of civility, we need to respect with respect to each other. And that's compatible with saying that you think other people are objectively wrong in some of the things they believe, and some of the choices they make. Rather, the grounding for tolerance was an epistemological stance to say that nobody really knows what's right or wrong, what's good or bad or better or worse. That I have my preferences and you have your preferences, but because none of us is in a better epistemological position, I'm not in a position to dictate to you, and you're not in a position to dictate to me. Therefore, we have to tolerate each other. Now, if one's grounding for tolerance, and then tolerance being an important feature of the broadly liberal classical liberal package, is that then when you do work that out, you don't, in the long run, then have an epistemological leg to stand on when people start challenging fundamental rights.
Why should I have a right to property? Why should I have a right to liberty? Why should I have a right to my life? Those are no longer, from your perspective, epistemologically objective principles that you can make an argument for and ground in reality. Instead, they become personal preferences that you happen to have, but you're supposed to be tolerating other people who might have completely different understandings of how society should be organized. And then it just becomes a matter of subjective wills competing with each other, and that ends up in a kind of intellectual bankruptcy. But it also puts you in a you don't know what to say, you don't know what to do position when you start dealing with people who are intolerant and have no problem with subverting various elements of the traditional classically liberal package. So that could be in the people you are confronting, Chris, another part of the philosophical problem.
[00:14:58] Speaker A: Great. Well, I do want to get to our founder, Dr. Kelly, but I do. First I want to go to Divine Wallace, who's been waiting. Thank you for waiting. Divine, do you have a question for Professor Hicks?
[00:15:13] Speaker E: All right, so thank you for letting me speak here.
My introduction to Objectivism happened this year. I'm only 18, so I read the book Ominous Parallels by Leonard Paykoff. And then over the summer, I read Atlas Shrugged. And about a month or two ago, I read the Virtuous Selfishness. So this year has been my Introduction to Philosophy as a whole.
I signed up for Peterson Academy about a month ago. I took your postmodern philosophy course first, and I quite enjoyed it. And I'm currently undergoing the modern philosophy course. So my question is, why do you think Immanuel Kant's ideas have really had so much influence on philosophy as a whole? How do these Sort of ideas really gain a lot of steam and get. Gain so much influence.
[00:16:09] Speaker B: Yeah, that's a, that's a very good question.
Let me, let's just say first, as you were talking about reading ominous parallels in an atlas and so forth, for the first time, I felt a little bit of nostalgia and envy because I. I would love to be 18 years old again and reading those books for the first time. So enjoy the process. All right, so to jump from that to Immanuel Kant, who, despite Objectivism's disagreements with everything fundamental in Kant and mine as well, there is certainly the question that he is arguably the most important philosopher of the last two and a half centuries.
And then you're raising in particular focus the issue of historical influence. So I think what I would say is that if one looks at where philosophy was at the. Toward the end of the 1700s, so this is now two centuries into the modern era.
Philosophy by that time had gotten itself into a bind or a couple of binds, because when one looks at the most fundamental epistemological and metaphysical issues, and certainly I think the epistemological issues were most emphasized in early modernity, the two major schools of modern epistemological thinking, the empiricists and rationalists, had reached dead ends. So there was a tradition that started from St. Francis Bacon on through John Locke. And as succeeding generations of philosophy philosophers over the 1600s and 1700s worked out the formulations of empiricism, they found little problems that became bigger problems that became seemingly insurmountable problems. So that by the time one gets to the generation of Immanuel Kant, empiricism seems to have reached a dead end. And then, similarly, a story can be told about the other side of the big story, the rationalists who said, you know, human beings are creatures of reason or reason fundamentally, but they have a more abstracted, what we now call rationalistic understanding of how reason works, sometimes from innate ideas or various a priori principles. And there was then a tradition that was worked out, starting from Descartes, going through Spinoza, Leibniz and, and so forth, but also as the century from 1600s into the 1700s, as that line was worked out, it also came to be seen as a dead end or as having some insurmountable problems. So part of then, the importance of Kant is that Kant is standing at the end of those two lines of developments, and he's a brilliant thinker, and he recognizes that empiricism has failed and rationalism has failed. And what he then is willing to do is to say, I'm not just going to try to tinker with empiricism and see if we can fix things or tinker with rationalism, see if we can fix things. We need to recognize that these approaches are in principle going to be failures. And he develops an original argument for why they not only are failures, but must be failures. And then on top of that, he comes up with another paradigm, as we might put it, or another way of conceptualizing the foundations of philosophy. And because, so to speak, nobody was able to defeat those arguments in Kant's generation or in the succeeding generations, they came to think that Kant is correct on fundamentals. So what we need to then do is accept that Kant is correct on fundamentals and work within that system to fine tune it, to elaborate it, to apply it to all of the other areas. And that was then one of the big project, perhaps the biggest philosophical project of the 19th century. So until philosopher of Kant's or comparable genius level to Kant can answer Kant and answer him on fundamentals and provide a compelling alternative, the Kantian influence is still going to be strong.
[00:21:08] Speaker A: Great answer.
[00:21:09] Speaker E: Very, very interesting.
[00:21:11] Speaker B: Thank you.
[00:21:14] Speaker E: My next.
This might be a bit of a stupid question, but I don't know much about Hegel. Did he kind of come up with the idea of dialectic that influence Marx to come up with dialectical materialism?
[00:21:30] Speaker B: I'm sorry, your voice is breaking up. If the question is, did Hegel come up with dialectical materialism?
[00:21:39] Speaker E: Did he like, kind of come up with the idea of the dialectic that influence Marx to come to, like, create dialectical materialism?
[00:21:49] Speaker B: Yes, they're both dialectical thinkers. And for them, dialectical is not primarily an epistemological thing. It's not that, you know, you put out an argument, I put out a counter argument, and we break them apart and put together, you know, what's good in your argument with what's good in my argument to have a better overall argument for both of them.
Dialectics is descriptive of metaphysics, the way, so to speak, the fundamental nature of causality as it works out in reality, that it literally works out by being in a certain ontological state that has within it literal contradictions. And those contradictions become extreme. And then out of the contradiction comes a new state of reality that, that overcomes the previous states and the contradictions that are, that are built into it. So they are arguing that reality is fundamentally driven by not. This is not just tensions and opposing forces and conflicts, but literal contradictions are built into reality. And then the difference between the two though is that Hegel is metaphysically an idealist. That is to say, he thinks the basic stuff of reality is spiritual or mental or consciousness. Sometimes he talks about God as a spiritual force, or sometimes he talks more impersonally about it being. Being with a capital D or providence with a capital P. But it's ultimately not a materialistic system that what we call matter is more epiphenomenal or a superficial state of a more underlying spiritual, non material reality.
So he's an idealist. And then Marx wants to say that he thinks the dialectical elements in Hegel are correct but that Hegel got the metaphysical substrate wrong or he got the ontology wrong. The actual stuff of reality is basically material and that what we call spiritual or consciousness is the thing that's epiphenomenal or superficial.
[00:24:23] Speaker A: Great. Maybe we'll get to divine if we have more time. His introduction. Enthusiasm is great.
Let's go to Dr. Kelly next. Thanks for joining us. Do you have a question for Stephen? You have to unmute yourself, and I'm not sure if you're able to unmute yourself, but if not, we can actually go to the bloody nerve.
[00:24:50] Speaker D: There we go.
[00:24:51] Speaker A: Oh, there. Okay, go ahead.
[00:24:53] Speaker D: Okay. Yeah, I want to go back to Stephen's first question about libertarians migrating or being driven towards socialism. Chris's question, but it also relates to Kant and that is that I've spent a lot of time in Objectivism and also as the founder and longtime advocate for Objectivism in.
In the intellectual, political marketplace of ideas. And one of the things that I've noticed, and this is to add to everything Steven said, which I agree with completely, and that is that one missing piece from every Objectivist and every libertarian theory except Objectivism is a rejection of altruism.
Other libertarian thinkers accept altruism, that we should live for others. That that's the ideal. And there's no way to reconcile a full case, consistent case for freedom, economic freedom especially, and limited government on that basis, on that altruist basis. So I think that's an important missing piece of many libertarians and it explains why they migrate to the left because the left is all entirely based as a collectivist version.
Morality and political philosophy is all based on altruism. And that, by the way, is something a piece of Kant's moral theory. Steven talked about the epistemological theory in Root and answered Vine's question. But he was also an important moralist and he just took altruism for granted from religious basis in his case. But for many Others, So I'll just leave it there. But thanks, Stephen, for the answers that you've given.
[00:27:04] Speaker B: I want to come back at some point and talk more about Kant's moral theories.
And there are some interesting subtleties there about whether he was an altruist or an impersonalist and exactly what the nature of his duty ethic is.
I think that would take a longer conversation than we have time for now.
[00:27:32] Speaker A: Okay, well, good. We've got next. The bloody nerve.
[00:27:39] Speaker F: Do you hear me? Okay.
[00:27:41] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:27:41] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:27:42] Speaker A: Okay, good.
[00:27:42] Speaker B: Hey.
[00:27:43] Speaker A: Hey.
[00:27:43] Speaker F: Thanks for putting this on. This is great. A lot of great questions and answers so far. I'm Stacy Blood, by the way. Thanks, Dr. Hicks, for doing this and sharing all this with us. Just a quick focus question here.
I'm really drawn to and kind of focusing on a very curious part, that part right between World War II and the 60s when things really start getting into full swing. And that's kind of the time around when Atlas Shrugged came out. You also have the Beat Generations going on, too. And in this time, it seems like there's a lot happening really fast. And I know the postmodern ideology is already starting to really get into the substrate, but particularly on like, that Beat Generation is very unusual, and it seems like this weird transition because you have, like a Jack Kerouac and On the Road came out same year as Atlas Shrugged, and you have two very different kind of works, but they're both very symbolized. They have a very symbolistic approach. But Jack Kerouac is kind of a strange animal because he does have some of the tenets from the time before leading into the 60s. And, of course, he became such a big figure in the 60s. But just in your opinion, what is going on with a guy like Caraway because he just seems so unusual?
[00:29:02] Speaker B: Well, I'll have to say that I. I don't have an informed opinion to be able to speak to that question in any. In any significant way. I read some of Kerouac when I was in my. My late teens and early twenties, and I. It didn't really strike me as that significant at the time. Didn't strike a chord, so I did not pursue it. So beyond that, I only have standard amateur understanding about the Beat Generation. I can name the names, but I think what you're. It's a good question about what's going on in the literary zeitgeist in the. In the 50s and 60s. And clearly the Beat Generation is striking a chord with a lot of people and is culturally influential. I think it would take someone who has more literary familiarity with those texts than I have now.
[00:30:07] Speaker F: Yeah, it's hard to find that. It's just something that's not discussed very often. So it's left me very curious about that because we go right into the 60s and we have all, of course, all that comes out after and has come since and that's, it's a very, just a very unusual time. I was just curious if you had any thoughts on it.
[00:30:24] Speaker B: Yeah, let me just make a side recommendation. One of my philosophy colleagues is someone well versed in history of philosophy. Aristotelianism knows objectivism as well, but I know he is interested in the beat phenomena. His name is Roderick Long, so you might look him up on social media. He teaches philosophy at a university in Alabama. I believe he might be a good sounding board for that question.
[00:30:56] Speaker F: Excellent. Yeah, I'll do that. Yeah, thanks so much. I appreciate it. And thanks for doing this again.
[00:31:00] Speaker B: Pleasure.
[00:31:02] Speaker A: Great. Well, if anyone wants to request to speak, we encourage you to do so. I have more from social media. Here's one saying you posted on tax fairness, noting that Walmart's profits are much less than the tax rates Walmart pays.
But do you, do you make theft fair?
[00:31:25] Speaker B: Yes, yes, I remember that question. Yeah, I did on social media put up a couple of posts recently about tax fairness and taxation issues.
Yeah, the Walmart one was just caught my eye. How many people are complaining about high prices? Of course we're all complaining about high prices, but in the ensuing blame storming, figuring out whether it's corporate greed or whether it's government fiat currency just being pumped into the economy. But a lot of the criticism that I, I was encountering was people saying that Walmart and other representative corporations are just making these huge profits and these huge profits are so unfair.
So I just pointed out some statistics. One was that Walmart consistently over the last decades makes between 2 to 3% profit each year on all of its, on all of its activities.
But if you look at the taxes that it pays, the various major cities like Chicago, San Francisco and so forth, every single purchase that one makes is then subject to 8 or 9% city tax.
And then there will also be state level taxes that are imposed as well. And so just, I was just pointing out that if you really are concerned with rising prices and who is so to speak, gouging the company that is making, you know, 2% profit on every sale, but meanwhile the city government is making over 8% profit on every sale. Make sure you first direct your price gouging attention toward the appropriate party. Also I think in that post, just a statistic that Walmart pays at the federal level on all of its profits, 29% or more federal tax each year. So if you're concerned with fairness, there's a set of data to pay attention to. But then this follow up comment was an interesting one just about how do you make theft fair? And it's interesting because then there's a position that wants to say it's not a question of figuring out what the appropriate tax level should be for individuals, for corporations, whether it should be a flat tax or, or some sort of progressive tax as they call it, or what. But this one was seemingly objecting to the idea of there being a taxation at all.
And I think what I would say is that I'm not an anarchist and objectivism is not an anarchist position. So the position is that there are legitimate functions that government should, should be performing. You know, in our view, or in my view, it's a fairly delimited set of things that governments should properly be doing that they are serving an agency role. That is to say, they are an institution that we citizens set up to perform certain functions on our behalf. And so the kind of the standard phrase coming out of the liberal tradition that the government is the servant of the people is a nice way of catching it. We're not the, the government is not our masters, but rather they are, they have certain delegated powers to do jobs on our behalf. So they are a servant of the people and they are, if properly delimited, doing legitimate functions. And part of that then is to say that, you know, as one should pay one's agents or one should pay one's surgeons, servants, we citizens do have to figure out some way to pay for the government that's performing legitimate functions on our behalf. And then in that context, the question of what's a fair assessment for, from us as citizens to pay for the services that government is legitimately rendering. So I think there is such a thing as a context within which one should be thinking about what fair taxation would look like. So I don't think that all taxation is theft. I think currently a significant amount of our tax dollars are spent on things that government has no business doing. And there's, it's not just that they're, they're doing things that they shouldn't be doing. They're also inefficiently, wastefully doing all sorts of things as well. So there's lots of kind of unfairness built into the, into the current system. But I Resist the idea that taxation is in and of itself unfair or theft.
[00:36:55] Speaker A: Fair distinction.
Jeff asks, do you have any books, recommendations on intros to philosophy for blue collar laymen like me?
[00:37:08] Speaker B: Yeah, that's a, that's a good question.
Over the years, what I've done is I make two recommendations. One is if you are interested in philosophy and you want an overview systematically of all the major issues of philosophy, you know, from metaphysical issues like, you know, is the universe eternal or did it come into existence? Is space, does God exist? And so on through the issues of knowledge and human nature and ethics and so on. There's a fun book that was written by. It's a couple of decades ago, but it's come out in successive editions called Douglas Palmer does the Center Hold.
And he's a lively writer, he writes in a very accessible fashion, and he also includes various fun cartoons and illustrations along the way. So if it's at the sort of the blue collar layman descriptor level, I would recommend that book. If one wants a systematic walkthrough of most of the big issues in philosophy, if one's interest in philosophy is more historical and one is interested in how philosophy got started, who the big names and the great geniuses of philosophy have been, they're going back to the Greeks and on through the Romans, the medieval era, the moderns, and up to the 20th century. My favorite history of philosophy has always been W.T. jones.
It's called A History of Western Philosophy and it's in five volumes. But what I like about Jones is that he is a very clear writer and a very good philosopher. So he gives very good summaries in intelligible fashion of all of the major philosophers and their ideas. But he's also historically sensitive and he makes a point of not simply talking about Socrates as a series of premises and arguments, but rather Socrates as an individual who was living at a certain time. So he puts him in the historical context about what was going on in Greece, in the context of coming out of the Persian wars, and then how the Peloponnesian War, for example, influenced Socrates and how he was doing his thinking and so forth. So you get a nice blending of the philosophy clearly stated with the, the, the, the history.
So those two great.
[00:40:02] Speaker A: That's worth checking out.
This one is questioning you from Shakey. Why do you persist in saying the Nazis were socialists when clearly they were on the right and semi capitalists in bed with big business?
[00:40:23] Speaker B: Okay, yeah. This is a common question, particularly from people on the left who are friendly to socialism or are gung ho about socialism or communism.
And of course, you know, the Nazis have a deservedly horrible reputation. So they want to dissociate at all their understanding of socialism from Nazism.
And one of the things here is the question of whether the official name for the party, National Socialism is truth in advertising or whether it's a bit of rhetorical fluff. And I think that it is a case of truth in advertising. The Nazis did think of themselves as socialists and they hated capitalism. It's not necessarily to say that they didn't work with certain capitalists, that is to say, some members of people who had big business with whom they had ideological, ideological arrangements. But one thing that's important for our generation is that the way socialism was understood after World War II and after the disaster of National Socialism is narrower than prior to World War II. And that in the 1910s, the 1920s and the 1930s, it was clear to everybody involved, whether you agreed with socialism or not, that the National Socialists were advocating for, or at least economic socialism.
And one way of checking this is if you go back to the original Nazi Party charter, when the party was formed in the year 1920. So actually, I think they were formed the year before, but they came out with an official Nazi Party program, National Socialist German Workers Party, they called it, in 1920. And they had a 25 point program. These are our 25 fundamental principles. And if you go through and you just look at each of them, approximately 14 or 15 of them are dealing directly with economic matters. And all of those are straightforward socialist points where they are talking about controlling corporations, they are talking about abolishing certain kinds of profits, they're talking about abolishing interest charges of certain sorts. They're talking about government taking in huge amounts of money and redistributing wealth to various sectors in society. So all of those points are points that are in the Nazi Party program that socialists to this day would agree with. And they are all kind of anti capitalist or anti free market points. So then if you read, you know, the speeches of Goebbels, you read some of the other leading intellectuals who were, you know, gung ho supporters of the National Socialist Party, people like Molar Vandenbroek, or he's especially saying, you know, we are, we are socialists, we want a socialist economic polity, and we hate capitalists and so forth. But the other thing is that the meaning of socialism was controversial then as it is now. In part because if you want to say you are a socialist, one of the questions you have to Ask is, what do you mean by the social? Or what do you take society to be?
Now, all socialists will say that people are not first and foremost individuals, and you're not an individual with your own rights, you are a part of society, you belong to society, or you should serve society. So that's to make the socialist element central. But you can have different conceptions of what a proper society is. And one of the big divides then was between those who say we have to understand society as primarily an ethnic nation. So in the case of the Germans, they would say, we are Germans, and that means we have a certain language, we have a certain history, we have a certain understanding of religion, a certain way of dressing, a certain way of thinking, a certain set of mores about how we treat each other and so forth. So the operative social unit is this national ethnic group, that is the German. And then different ethnicities and different nations have their own societies, and we will recognize that. So it's an ethnic understanding of what proper socialism is. And individuals should then serve their ethnicity or see their, their identity as bound up with being a part of that ethnicity or being a part of that nation. And that was controversial from the perspective of then one of the leading other versions of socialism that said, no, individuals are not primarily individuals. They don't have individual rights. They are part of a society, a social organism or a social being. But it's not ethnicity that is fundamental. Rather it is one's economic status and one's economic mode of being that is fundamental. And this of course, is the Marxist or the communist. So they will say people who have the same economic function in any society, whether you are German or Japanese or Australian or whatever, your ethnicity does not matter. What matters is what is your economic function in society. And if you are a physical laborer, a worker, then you are a, a part and a fundamental part of society and the most valuable part of society. And then various other elements within society are lesser in various degrees or may even be enemies of that society. So then from their perspective, the right kind of socialism is going to be an economically international understanding of society that abstracts away or ignorant wars differences of ethnicity and nationalism. So then it really is the big debate in the teens, twenties, and on into the thirties whether the proper form of socialism is nationalistically understood or whether it should be internationally understood.
But they both recognized that they were socialists just disagreeing about what the right kind of socialism was. And they both recognized that they were hated enemies of the capitalists and the individuals. So on that score, the National Socialists were Clearly socialists by their own self understanding and just in terms of what these categories mean and what their political philosophical precepts are.
Now there was a tail end of the question about being in bed with big business.
And this is certainly another important issue now here. I think the thing is not to confuse the fact that someone is running a big business with that person being a capitalist. Now in one sense that person is organizing a lot of capital in the economic sense. But that person is not necessarily someone who believes in private property and free markets and all of that sort of stuff that capitalism as a, an economic philosophy or more broadly as a political philosophy. There's lots and lots of people who are big business runners, CEOs who believe in communism, who believe in fascism, who believe believe in national socialism. We believe in. Right, whatever. And in many cases those people are quite fine with working with various sorts of government. So make that distinction.
[00:49:08] Speaker A: Great, good distinction.
This next one is from Steve R.
Why was the artificial mind body and then either or dichotomy taken so seriously in philosophy for centuries? Some things are either or.
[00:49:29] Speaker B: So the mind body distinction, why it was taken so seriously for centuries, huh? That's a, that's a huge question.
I think that's really, that's really hard. I think probably because before we started doing part of the answer would be before we started doing philosophy in any significant way, going back to the Greeks 2600 years or so ago, that in that pre philosophical, pre scientific time, there is a natural question about trying to figure out what human consciousness is or what the human mind is.
And I think it would be pretty easy to say that there is something different about the human mind compared to all of the other things that I can see and interact with in reality. Rocks and trees and water and other animals and so forth.
And it would be an easy hypothesis to think that consciousness is something different from things that are material. You can't see, smell, taste or touch it. Nonetheless, it seems to be real.
You might be reflecting on phenomena such as dreams where you know your body is entirely inert while you are sleeping, but nonetheless your mind, you know, after you wake up from your dream you say wow, that was so real and what's going on? And have a. Then as a natural hypothesis that it must be that the mind has a life of its own, that it can function independently of the body in some way.
Some of the natural fears and worries we have about death and not wanting death than to project the idea that maybe the mind or the soul, there's something in us that animates us can separate from the body and go somewhere else.
Various other things.
In a pre philosophical sense, if you're trying to understand why strange things happen up in the skies, you know, there's thunder and meteors and occasional seemingly inexplicable dimensions, there's, you know, spiritual beings. So I think many of the pre philosophical religions can, you know, excuse. I don't want to put that, that's too patronizing. That more easily come to think that there is a difference between the mind and the body and that those are just part of human culture, then they become instantiated over the course of many tens of thousands of years. And then by the time we then start trying to do philosophy more systematically, those initial considerations can be worked up into more serious philosophical arguments.
And then unless the good answer to those arguments arguments, they will persist for a long period of time anyway. That's just a, I think a bare beginning because that's a very big question.
[00:52:58] Speaker A: Yeah, great answer.
Especially the part about death. I think that makes a lot of sense. Dr. Kelly, did you want to.
[00:53:06] Speaker D: Yeah, I just wanted to jump in for a second. Stephen's answer is great historically, but I think the reason that the mind body problem is, is still an issue and a big one in philosophy. It's always been a perennial issue in philosophy, but it's a big one even today among, you know, secular oriented people who don't believe in heaven or.
It is still one of the. One of the. One of the things that has still kept us as a live issue is that we have different degrees of epistemological assets.
No, I can introspect. No one else can see into my mind. Everyone can see the world and everyone can see my body and my brain, but no one can see my consciousness. And so it has seemed like there's no way to integrate the two or there are many theories about how to integrate them. I think it's not a huge issue.
I think the objectives here is that consciousness emerges from the neurological basis of our brains and it happened evolutionarily and we now have the capacity to reason and. Or I think consciousness serves as a biological function.
But I could go on about this, but the point is that in addition to the, you know, the observations that people have made for centuries, even today, there is still the remaining issue of the how consciousness relates to the brain since we have different degrees of access to each one.
I'll leave it there.
[00:55:05] Speaker A: Okay.
Well, Stephen, I've got another question from Ryan B. Do you think we're about to go through a counter Enlightenment.
[00:55:22] Speaker B: Yeah, prediction is hard.
Let's just start with the, I think the easier part of that, which is assessing where we are right now.
Right now we are in the midst of a philosophical battle, a culture war.
And that has some political elements between significant, still Enlightenment individualist, pro reason, pro science, pro liberty people and that we are I think still significantly characterized as that kind of a culture. But at the same time there are various kind of counter movements to that. There are some that like the, the technological and scientific part of it, but they combine that with some paternalism and collectivism and they don't like then the individual liberty and the free markets elements. So they want to have a kind of a managed technocratic society and a paternalistic form. And that is another powerful sub faction in contemporary society.
And clearly we have another significant faction within our society that is irrationalist and anti individualistic and much more interested in new kinds of tribalism, whether they are racial or gender based or religion or ethnicity based.
And they for various reasons are organized and definitely trying to subvert the Enlightenment and all of the individualistic and freedom oriented institutions in the current society. So it's at least I think a three way debate and a three way battle that's going on currently now.
Which of those is going to prevail? That's where the prediction part comes in. And I, when this kind of question comes up in various ways, I still remain cautiously optimistic. I think the Enlightenment liberal tradition, it has reason on its side and it is very tolerant of arguments all over the map, was willing to give pretty much every argument a hearing.
And in the midst of giving the arguments a hearing, it's not clear who's going to prevail in the argument. But we have a very good track record of winning those arguments. When those arguments spill out into battles culturally and into wars sometimes, often, you know, the Enlightenment liberal approach is a bit late to the game.
But we do get our acts together and when we do have to fight, we, we fight effectively.
And so far we've, you know, we've, we've prevailed. So when we look at the various elements in the current culture wars, it's, it's always messy in the midst of them, but I think we will prevail. So just take one example. Much of my career has been inside higher education and for the last 10 or more years there's been a huge amount of wokeism and DEI and speech codes and all kinds of stuff like that going on. And those have made significant headway.
But 10 years is not a really long time in the life of academic institutions, which are very slow, changing institutions. And already we are seeing that there's a lot of resistance over the last 10 years. And the resistance gets itself organized. All of the arguments get heard. Sometimes things get messy, windows get broken, students occupy this, that or the other building and so forth. But as we're starting to see in the last year or so, a dozen or more major universities are saying we're going to abandon our DEI programs. We're going to no longer have various kinds of speech codes in place, or we're going to loosen those up in various ways, or we're not going to have our universities taking positions on whatever the trendy political issue of the week is. We're going to have institutional neutrality. So there are then signs that the system is working and that give another five years, we will be looking back on what has been some ugliness and some nastiness. And for those of us who are advocates of liberal education, some disbelief that we have to have this argument again and that it's being conducted in such an uncivil fashion. But I think I'm going to prevail.
And then if we can extrapolate just from that one institution, that's to say higher education.
We're constantly debating dozens of issues simultaneously all over the nation and now internationally. But I think in many cases it's a case, as the cliche of saying of two steps forward, one step back, and then another two steps forward. So perhaps the last 10 years has been a giant step back in a lot of ways, but we're turning things around.
[01:01:33] Speaker A: Good. Refreshing optimism. So well, thank you so much for doing this, Stephen. Thanks to all of you who joined us in the audience or with questions. If you enjoyed this or any of our other materials, please consider making a tax deductible donation@Atlas Society.org. look forward to seeing you at the next one. Take care, everybody.
