Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Thanks everyone, for joining us today. We're pleased to have Atlas Society senior scholar Stephen Hicks to discuss how Foucault and Derrida won the transgender and insanity debate.
I hope I pronounced their names correctly. Stephen, it's an intriguing topic. After Stephen's remarks, we're going to open it up for questions. So please raise your hand if you want to ask a question and we'll try to get to as many as possible.
Steven, thanks so much for doing this. Guess, you know, who were they, what were their ideas and why have they been winning?
[00:00:37] Speaker B: Right? Okay, well, thanks for the introduction, guys, and for providing the space.
Do some preparatory journalism. One of the question that's been on my mind and I know on many thinking people's minds and those who are following social media and many of the cultural events where there's a significant amount of craziness on display and perversion on display, down to the point of trying to influence and manipulate children in various ways.
And the question is, where does this come from? How has it burst onto the cultural scene so quickly and so strongly? And then I want to say as a professional philosopher that in my readings of other philosophers, I have, I think, a partial answer to that. There is a significant philosophical contribution to these cultural events, and this is partly a matter of just trying to explain how cultures work, to come at it from the other end, how ideas matter, especially philosophical ideas matter. I think there's a connection here. But at the same time, I want to upfront say that these are all complicated issues, this issue of insanity versus insanity, issues of sexuality and the psychology of sexuality, as well as the culture of sexuality, how open or closed things should be. So what I want to say is that I don't want today to talk about the issue of where we should draw lines between people being sane and insane. There are lots of technical issues there or how open we should be publicly about issues of sexuality, how much we should tolerate differences, borderline cases between sane and insane or between healthy sexuality and the concept of perversion, and issues of genuine problem cases, how as individuals and as societies, we should deal with those. Instead, I wanted to talk about the philosophy of these issues and the way in which the philosophical debate and the way it has gone has shaped the professionals and how they think about these matters and how that then eventually spilled out into the culture. So I want to take it for granted that there are genuine issues about borderline cases and genuine issues about the scope of tolerance and so forth, and just say that those exist, but set those aside. So wherever you draw those lines, that's on the other side of that line. Stuff that is clearly insane or stuff that clearly is subverting or perverting, where has that come from and why has it seemingly come from perhaps out of nowhere so quickly to have such a prominent dominant space on our cultural and intellectual landscape. I want to say one answer to that question. This is an answer that I'm going to reject, but it's fairly prominent. That is to say, well, all of this comes from abandoning objective morality in a religious sense. So that is to say, well if we were going to say that there are universal standards or that there are objective standards, then the only place we could get those is from a God. And if you abandon God you're going to get some bizarre, insane, perverted moralities prevalent in your culture. So if there's no God, then everything is permitted, everything becomes subjective. If everything is subjective then since subjects differ amongst each other, they can make up whatever they want. We have to have some ultimately virulent form of relativism. And then if there's virulent relativism, we only have a choice between being tolerant since I can't say that my morality is better than anybody else's, that puts me into a position of having to tolerate anything goes, including things. That I might personally think are weird or perverted or whatever. Or if I don't want to go down that road, I will see relativism in this strong form as just licensing me to impose my values on anybody.
No. Matter how weird my personal values are, even if by my own admission, because no one can say that I can't impose them on anybody else. There's nothing to stop. So then this argument says if we abandon God then we're left with this choice, either this universal toleration where I have to put up with anything or this license to impose whatever it is that I want on anybody else.
And then the religious morality position then wants to say well if you don't like either of those choices you have to do a long kind of denying the consequent or a long modus tollance and go back and then say all of this comes from abandoning God. And so the only way to avoid that unsavory outcome is to go back to God. Now that then is an understandable reaction to a lot of the craziness in the cultural public space. But I'm going to reject that answer as well. So if we then try to say where this comes from and why it has burst onto the scene so seemingly explicitly and quickly, I want to suggest that it is the postmodernists who have won the debate, that they won the debate back in the 1960s and in the 1970s intellectually. That is to say, not that everybody stood up and said the postmoderns won, but the field was abandoned to the postmoderns intellectually and that there was then during the 1980s and in the 1990s a very clear lineage of the leading postmodernists, primarily Michele Foucault and on this issue also Jacques Derry Daw. They won the debate since we're talking a lot about colonization. They were able to colonize the relevant professional schools in much of psychology, much of social psychology, much of psychiatry, and then the professional schools that are dealing with issues of psychology, psychiatry, the distinction between normal and abnormal psychology. And then in the next generation of professional practicers practitioners in these disciplines, therapists and others, they largely were dominated by Foucaultian and doridian rather approaches to these issues. And then that is a kind of march through the institutions in the early two thousand s and then what we find is in the cultural space the doors are open and into those open doors then we get the cultural manifestations which seems sudden to us, but suddenly it is everywhere. It's on the streets, it's getting into the schools and so on. So what I want to do next is spend a little bit of time talking about Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. And again I want to highlight the importance of these individuals.
And this also is documentable in various ways. So for example, one of the things that we now have in the last generation is we can measure influence in terms of citations by prominent scholars. So Google Scholar for example, will go through all of the published literature and just do a simple word count about what scholars are the most cited, what books are the ones that are most cited, and so as a result of that they can tell you which intellectuals are having the most impact and so on. So recently I go to Google Scholar and I ask it in the fields of social science to say who are the most influential social scientists ever?
And then you can narrow this down. Actually, Google Scholar doesn't as accurately go back beyond a century or so. So this is weighted toward the last century or so. But what you find is then it will generate a list of the most cited scholars, the most cited books and so forth. And what we find is that if you take the top ten most cited, michelle Foucault has not one, but two books in the top ten most cited books of the past century. Also in the top ten is Thomas Coon's Structure of Scientific Revolutions, paolo Frey's Pedagogy of the Oppressed, which is a kind of a combination postmodern Christian, although it's kind of a Christian liberation theology that gets folded into the postmodernism. Also in the top ten.
And then there's a number of books on business competitive strategy, there are some on cognitive theory, one on the politics of nationalism. John Rawls's Theory of justice is also in the top ten as well. The point is that Measurably Michelle Foucault's influence is huge in the social sciences, in the areas on which he has published. And the two books that are most cited are Madness and Civilization. So that's dealing with the issue of insanity and sanity. And the other one is A History of Sexuality, volume one and dealing precisely with issues of so called healthy or so called normal sexuality, as he describes it, and again, so called perverted sexuality. So these issues of madness and sanity and sexuality, Foucault's influence is all over the place. And then Jacques Derrida enormously influential on linguistics, philosophy of language and his theory of deconstruction.
Are you arguing there are no fixed meanings? We cannot give objective definitions of concepts and then believing, along with Derry Daw, that any grammar is motivated by a power play or behind the scenes political moral agenda that tries to impose its linguistic framework on all other ones. And so all of them need to be deconstructed and seen as power plays. Kind of confluence with Foucaultian ideas as well. So point just being that these guys are giants on the landscape, it's largely measurable. So what I want to do is just next to give a few tastes from two works, one from Foucault, one from Derrida, just on these issues of sexuality and these issues of sanity or not, so we can see intellectually where these ideas first come from and what they mean. So how does that sound? Scott and Lawrence, can I go for, say, another five or ten minutes before we turn things open to questions? Or should I be more socratic and interactive?
[00:13:14] Speaker A: No, I think another five or ten minutes is great. We're going at least till 730 Eastern, so we've got time, and I'm interested to hear what you have to say about it.
[00:13:24] Speaker B: Okay, all right. So I'm going to turn, then to the history of sexuality. Many of the postmoderns have a reputation for being unclear writers. Foucault, I think, is one of the clearer writers. So I recommend that you go and have a look at this book published in the 1970s. It basically is the bible of postmodern philosophy of sex and all queer theory. Much of the debates that we are having about transsexuality and so forth, and whether it's appropriate for adults to have sex with children, all of those debates are rooted in and largely dominated by Foucault's account in a history of sexuality. So it will be enormously clarification if I can use that word. So what Foucault wants to do in this book, he wants to make an argument that we have a certain account of how sexuality has occurred and discussions about sexuality in the modern world. So the idea was, back in the old days, we were much more repressive about talking about sexuality, that there was kind of medieval Christianity was dominant and it was quite repressive, and everybody was supposed to follow a certain model of sexuality. Children were supposed to be seen and not heard, and children didn't have any sexuality and so forth. Homosexuality was the great sin, and it was largely repressed. And people who didn't fit the married couple having sex in order to procreate all of those sexualities were repressed and so on, that it reached its height, perhaps in the Victorian era of the 18 hundreds with a very prudish account of sexuality and so on. Of course, there was a lot of hypocrisy going under the scene. But it wasn't really until we got into, say, the 20th century maybe with a little bit of help with Freud that we have modern liberalism coming on that all of that old fashioned repressionism starts to go away and we become, under liberalism and capitalism sexually free and liberated and women are liberated and gays are liberated and so on. So the modern world tries to tell a good news story about sexual liberation. And what Freud wants to argue is that that story is false to the history.
Another form of the story is a kind of Marxist story about sexual repression and so forth. And it wants to not, of course, give any credit to capitalism and liberalism for sexual liberalism. But what this story typically does this is an orthodox Marxist story and Foucault ends up being a kind of neomarxist on this scene. But he wants to argue that the neomarxist story needs some serious regulation sorry, serious revision. So what this Marxist story tells us is that before the 17th century, before the beginnings of capitalism and liberalism peasants out in the field and everybody was able to be pretty open. There was not a big machinery of the state or the capitalists trying to control all of our energy for economic purposes. And so before capitalism, things were pretty free and open with respect to sexuality. But then along came capitalism. And what capitalism, of course, wants to do is take all of people's economic energies and direct them into the factories and regulate agriculture so that it can make sure that everybody's working as hard as it possibly can. And so that includes wanting to control people's sexual energy so that there's no energy that is dispersed that can't be captured for capitalist profits and so on. And so, coinciding with the capitalists trying to organize all of economic production the capitalists are trying to organize all sexual production. And so it's really under capitalism that we find from this, according to this story, that the rise of regulations against homosexuality, regulations against sex outside of marriage, trying to get everybody to have sex only in the marital bed. So that we increase the number of workers down the road who will then be able to farm the capitalist fields and man the capitalist factories and so on. And so out of that story, this Marxist story or classical Marxist story we have increasing regulation of sexuality and increasing regulation of the economy and those are working hand and fist with each other. But what Folklore wants to argue is I'll give you a quotation here where he says it appears to me that the essential thing is not this economic factor that we don't find increasing repression and driving things underground, our sexual energies underground. And whether we're only allowed to talk about sex in a marital context and in the bedroom and so forth, and children are supposed to be shut up and that we have kind of more censorship and so on. What Foucault wants to argue is that, in fact, as modernity has come along, it has in fact allowed more talking about sex, more openness about sex, but in certain controlled regimes, and those controlled regimes are the judicial system and the scientific system. So what has happened in the modern world is the development of an entire psychological and psychiatric apparatus where there's lots and lots of talking about sex and also in the judicial atmosphere, a lot more regulations about sex with respect to children, with respect to homosexuality, with respect to various other things and so on. So in his language, he says what has happened in the modern world is not control and repression for economic reasons, but control and repression for so called scientific psychological reasons and for so called scientific judicial reasons. So the way he puts it is this way by means rather of this example. So let me read this example to you.
He wants to go back to 1867. So this is now well into modern so called liberalism and modern capitalism. So here's the example. One day in 1867, a farm hand from the village of Lapcor this is somewhere in France.
A simple minded employee there working on jobs here and there, sleeping in barns and stables. He was turned into the authorities. And what was his crime? At the border of a field, he had obtained a few caresses from a little girl, just as he had done before and seen done by the village urchins around him. For at the edge of the wood or in the ditch by the road leading to St. Nicholas, they would play the familiar game called curdled milk. Now, I need to pause and explain this here.
Prepare to have your sensibilities offended. So we're in a rural village and apparently the practice is that older men, working men, can receive sexual favors from little girls and that this is a fairly common practice that goes on such to the point where they have a name for it, the game called curdled milk. So here we have to imagine in a farm context, we get milk from cows and how the milking process goes with hands moving up and down and it results in milk. And of course, if milk sits out for too long, it becomes curdled. And then that has a certain look. So apparently what's going on is the little girl at the enticement of this man is playing this game of curdled look milk. And Foucault goes on to say that he gave her a few pennies in exchange for this favor. But then something happened in the modern world. As we got into the modern world, he was pointed out to the authorities, he was pointed out by the girl's parents to the mayor of the village. He was reported by the mayor, to the Jean d'arms, led by the Jean d'arms, to the judge who indicted him and turned him over to a doctor, and then to two other experts who not only wrote a report but also had it published. What is the significant thing about the story still quoting Foucault directly here the pettiness of it all the fact that this everyday occurrence in the life of village sexuality, these inconsequential bucolic pleasures, could become, from a certain time, the object not only of collective intolerance but of a judicial action, a medical intervention, a careful clinical examination, and an entire theoretical elaboration. So I'm stopping the quotation there. What Foucault then is saying is prior to the development of capitalism and liberalism, yes, things were open and free and so forth, and men and girls in this case could have all kinds of sexual encounters and money could be exchanged. And it was pretty ordinary, normal village sexuality. Nobody made a big deal about it. But now we are getting into the modern world and we have this idea scientifically that there's a distinction between normal sex and abnormal sex, and on the abnormal sex includes any sex between adults and children. We are now going to study this scientifically. We're going to develop this whole apparatus of scientists who believe that there's a distinction between normal sex and perverted sex. We're going to give them lots of money, lots of institutions, including places where we can lock up people we have now defined as perverts. We're going to develop an entire legal apparatus, we're going to put the police on it, we're going to have the whole judicial system on it, we're going to have special jails for all of the people we have now defined as sexual deperverts and convicted them of crimes. And all of this then is authoritarianism of a certain regime applied to sexuality. But it's working hand in hand with all of the other developing authoritarianism of modern capitalism. So what we then have is modern society, and by which he means modern liberal, capitalistic society is perverse. That's a direct quote from Foucault. It's perverse in its fundamentality.
Let us put forth a general working hypothesis and I'll end with this one. The society that emerged in the 19th century, bourgeois, capitalist, industrial, call it what you will put into operation an entire machinery for producing true discourses. And we put this in quotations now concerning it. Not only did it speak of sex and compel everyone to do so, it set out to formulate the uniform truth of sex. And so it then goes on to have certain prohibitions of the so called great sin against nature, homosexuality. It goes on to condemn pederasty. And then Foucault also interests the phrase psychic hermaphrodism. And this is the one that's going to be directly relevant to our debates now over transgenderism. So hermaphrodism, the idea here that being biologically some people don't clearly present as male or female but perhaps present neither or combinations of the two. But what Foucault is talking about here is the people who psychologically don't, as we now say, speak of or clearly manifest as male or female that it is under this modern, so called scientific capitalism, judicial regime that that is now on the perverted side of sexuality and subject to scientific and judicial repression. So I will draw a line there under Foucault. I haven't said anything yet about dairy dog because I recognize I'm running longer than my promised five minutes or so. But the point here is going to be that what Foucault is doing is saying there is no such thing as an objective distinction between normal sex and any sort of perversion in principle. It's not that they're hard to draw the line that we need better science or perhaps a more lenient judicial regime. He wants to say that instead there is an agenda at work that is capitalist authoritarianism, that wants to oppress sexuality for its own purposes. And it's for that reason that it is drawing a line with respect to sexuality in a certain way saying that only certain things count as normal sex. Everything else is going to be oppressed. We are going to talk a lot about it, but we're going to talk about it only under a regime that allows for a kind of scientific authoritarianism and a kind of judicial authoritarianism that works hand in hand with the traditional capitalist understanding of capitalist authoritarianism and oppression. Now, once that then becomes the regime intellectually and this is now at the level of high philosophy we can imagine what the psychologists do with this, what anybody who is interested in reforming the judicial system from this perspective wants to do with it and then various other disciplines. This in the 1980s, 1990s onto the early knots becomes not just a marginalized discipline, but it becomes one of the most widely cited and used theories and that I want to put forth as a hypothesis as why, when we get into the teens of this century. Suddenly we are having the debates about sexuality the way we are in the cultural space and lots of activism on behalf of it. And then, of course, lots of people who are representative of those sexualities suddenly emboldened and in the public space in a way that they have not been for a long time. All right, so I'm coming up to 30 minutes. Let me draw a line there for that and let's open things up for discussion. We can come back to the dairy daw material if we have time.
[00:29:05] Speaker A: Great. Excellent material. We want to open it up. If people have questions, we welcome you to raise your hands. I've got some I've been jotting down as you've been talking.
Did Foucault say that there are more hemaphrodites and they're being repressed from coming out or what percentage should there be should we all be striving for that?
[00:29:31] Speaker B: Yeah. No, nothing like that.
With respect to this psychic hermaphrodism, it's just one passing mention. Actually, there may be another mention as well, but nothing at the level of saying that it's perfectly natural and normal. It's just that he's saying that this is an alternative psychological state with respect to sexuality and we should be open to it and not have any idea that there is an objective science. And that what we are calling the psychology or sorry, the scientific psychology of sex has any sort of objective basis.
[00:30:16] Speaker A: Not even physical biology?
[00:30:20] Speaker B: No.
Then if we want to generalize it from sexual psychology and sexual biology to biology in general, it's going to be the same argument just kicked up at a higher level of abstraction. Whatever science of biology you think you are doing, that itself is going to be just another power discourse. There is not going to be any such thing as an objective biology that is universal. We will just have biologies. But all so called scientific biologies are in the service of a power agenda.
[00:31:00] Speaker A: My Western prejudices of saying gender all up and down the animal kingdom, that's.
[00:31:07] Speaker B: The language that might be useful there. Because one way of talking about this is to say there is sex and there is gender. And then the standard distinction is to say that sex picks up the more strictly biological side of the spectrum and gender picks up the more individual choice and social variability side of the spectrum. But what we do find in the discussion here is to say it's not really an objective spectrum. Instead, what we need to do is just to say all is gender, everything is social construction, or everything is subjective individual construction, and that means we stop talking about sex or any sort of biological basis altogether.
[00:31:54] Speaker A: Okay, I want to go back to something that you said earlier about the intellectual field being abandoned to the postmodernists in the 60s. Was that just a vacuum of pro Western intellectuals that just had no direction after the Cold War?
[00:32:13] Speaker B: Yeah. Well, there's a larger philosophical story to be told here.
If we just limit ourselves to continental philosophy at this point. Continental philosophy is largely divorced from things going on in the Anglo American world.
And so it's dominated by Heideggerian philosophy, it's dominated by existentialist philosophy. So in the early postmodernists, like Michel Foucault and Jacques Di Daw, they are the Young Turks, so to speak, drawing out the implications of continental philosophy as they see it. So there is not in continental philosophy any strong tradition of objectivity or pro science at this point. But the more broad case about philosophy being hollowed out would be to say it's not only Heideggerian and existentialist subjectivity that is dominating. If you go into the Anglo American world, it's a fairly skeptical couple of decades. At that point as well, there had been a number of science friendly philosophies. The positivists and the logical positivists and the analytic philosophers of the early part of the 20th century. And even the pragmatists, to a large extent, did see themselves as pro science. That a big part of their job, is to help science clarify its concepts, work out what logic and the foundations of mathematics and scientific method are all about. The problem was that by the time you get into the all of those schools of Anglo American philosophy are reaching largely skeptical conclusions and so they are feeling rather dispirited and hollowed out. Which is largely why a philosopher such as Richard Rorty, for example, who's often grouped in with the postmodernists he preferred to call himself a neopragmatist of a certain sort, but he was widely sympathetic to heidegger and some of the other existentialists sorry, some of the other continental thinkers as well. So in the Anglo American tradition as well, things are also quite hollowed out. So there was an abandoning of the field in the sense that none of the major philosophers are saying we have a positive philosophy that can uphold objectivity realism and a robust scientific methodology as all. So that then means that in that vacuum space, someone like Foucault, who comes along and has a fresh new agenda, he's going to get a lot more attention than perhaps he otherwise would. I might also mention, just if we are talking inside the Anglo American world, thomas Coon, I think, is extraordinarily important on the landscape here when he published in 1962 his Structure of Scientific Revolutions in a way that is a capstone work about where philosophy of science was in the 1960s. And Kuhn is quite forthrightly saying we have to abandon the idea of objectivity, or that science has anything to do with truth or objectivity, or that we can say that we are even making scientific progress. All of those concepts, we just need to set them aside and we're into a relativized set of paradigms, all of which define their terms in ways that are incommensurable to all of the other paradigms such that we can't even understand each other across these paradigms. It's kind of a long winded answer to your question, Scott.
[00:36:22] Speaker A: I appreciate it.
Were their takes on history fairly accurate? I read something about Foucault's claim that people interacted with the insane to get mystical truths before the Enlightenment.
[00:36:41] Speaker B: Was Foucault's take on history accurate? I think for me right now, that's too big a question.
[00:36:49] Speaker A: Okay. All right.
[00:36:51] Speaker B: Right now, if we're just talking about the history of sexuality, what we have is three histories of sexuality in the mix, right? One is the liberal history of sexuality, which is to say, back in the bad old days when we were religious and authoritarian, there was a lot of repression of sexuality. But along comes liberalism and capitalism, and people are more generically free, and that gets applied to sexual freedom as well. Women liberation comes along, so women. Become more sexually free. People aren't working as much, so they have more time for fun and games and they have more money available to spend on fun and games. So there's the good news story about more freedom of sexuality. And then the capitalists will say the Industrial Revolution enabled us to develop more literature about sexuality, to come up with penicillin to control diseases including sexually transmitted diseases, develop birth control and birth control pills. So there's that whole good news story and Foucault wants to reject that story. He also wants to reject the classical Marxist history of sexuality which has to say yes. Under religion and feudalism there was a regime that tried to control sexuality for religious feudal purposes. But then the capitalists came along and tried to control sexuality for economic purposes directly, kind of to take all of that untamed sexual energy and confine it to the bedroom so that there's more workers. But also if people are only allowed to have sex in the bedroom if they're married, then there's more energy that can be captured for economic production. And Foucault wants to reject that story as too simplistic.
And so we have those three stories. So then the question I think the only history question that we could ask right now is in terms of those three stories about the history of sexuality, how good is Foucault's history on those one? How does that sound?
[00:39:20] Speaker A: I think that's a reasonable, you know, with the direct attack on objectivity as some sort know excuse for power mean, is it fair to call them subjectivists?
[00:39:38] Speaker B: To call Foucault? We haven't really gotten to Dairy Dog yet, but he signs on to a large amount of this. Are they subjectivists? I would say yes and no.
Ultimately I want to say that they are neither objectivist nor subjectivist if you define those terms carefully. Because what objectivist means in this context is that there is an objective reality independent of us and there are human subjects interacting with that reality.
That's the metaphysical distinction. But then we want to say that subjects like us have cognitive capacities and those cognitive capacities can be used objectively to competently come to know objective reality if it follows certain processes and so forth. Now, they are not objectivist in that sense.
So then the next phase is to say or the next phrase is often they say well then they are subjectivist, which means we are subjects. And as subjects we make up our own reality or we are able to rationalize ourselves into believing certain things or that we have value preferences that have nothing to do with reality and we try to just impose our subjective value preferences on reality. So there's that whole language of subjectivity as well and that's much, much closer to postmodernism. But I want to say that even that is not radical enough for someone like Foucault. Because what Foucault wants to argue is that we are neither objective selves nor subjective selves in that second sense. Because both of those are committed to the idea that human individuals have some kind of agency either agency to come to know objective reality or agency to create their own reality. Instead, Foucault wants to argue that what we call individuals or subjects is itself constructed by a metaphysical substrate, so that we are I want to put this all in Nietzschean language, and Foucault did like this Nietzschean language. What he wants to argue is ultimately that reality is just power prior to individuals, prior to societies, prior to anything, there's just power. There's what Nietzsche called it will to power, that it has agendas, and there's these different power centers that are in conflict with each other, and some of them come to dominate and some of them come to get subsumed and so forth. What Foucault wants to argue is that we subjects, or what we call a consciousness or our identity is just a throwing up of these underlying non subject power centers in conflict with each other. So our idea that I have a self or that I have values is itself constructed by something that is not a subject at all. So he has a very dehumanized understanding of what it is to be a human being.
So ultimately he is neither objective nor subjective.
So it's not that you're an objective human or a subjective human. He is ultimately a dehumanist reducing the human being to just these underlying power surges and so on. Now, I don't know if that's as metaphysical as you want to get, but I think that's the only way I can answer your question.
[00:43:52] Speaker A: I appreciate it. No, that's a good answer with some of the time we have left. I did a little reading on Derrida. It said that he even influenced architecture via his deconstructivism. I'm just wondering kind of how close that and his postmodernist influence put him to being like an ellsworth tooie.
[00:44:14] Speaker B: Yeah, I think the chronology is a little off on that. I think what we call postmodernism in architecture there is an influence from Derry Daw dairy. Dah started writing in the early sixty s and by the late 60s he was kind of recognized as the new enfon, terrible so to speak, the new bad boy of philosophy that everyone needed to reckon with in certain territories and on through the 70s. But what we call postmodernism and architecture was already a going thing in the decades before Derry Daw, just as postmodernism in the arts had been an ongoing thing before either Foucault and Derry Daw. So I think in the art world postmodern trends had already been underway and Foucault and Derry Daw are a later but strong contributor to the maintenance and the later postmodern directions that those ones took. But the idea of deconstruction that language, that particular formulation was certainly taken up by postmodern architects. And that linguistic formulation does in fact come out of Derry Dawg now let me just say just a couple of words. I won't go into the text on Derry Dah here, but Derry Dah first made his name by reacting to Foucault's text on madness and civilization. And Foucault there wants to argue that there is no objective distinction between the sane and the insane. The idea of rationality or reason's connection to reality that modern philosophy is all about, that itself is just a power imposition. We want to think of ourselves as sane and we define logic and rationality in a certain way. Anything that doesn't fit that subjective agenda we're just going to call that insane. And Foucault, sorry, Derry Daw takes over that distinction from Foucault and argues that he has not gone far enough with that. But what's interesting about Foucault, sorry, Derry DA now is that he makes it explicit that this is all part of a political agenda. That if you want to overthrow modern society, that is to say liberalism, science, capitalism, the whole shebang, you have to go after its epistemology, you have to go after its belief that human individuals have reason that is competent and objective, that there is a distinction between being rational and being insane. That logic, mathematics and so forth have an objective grounding. So he makes the point explicitly that his entire deconstruction project is with destabilizing language so as to destabilize individuals belief that they have an objective rationality.
And so on the basis of that we can destabilize the entire western philosophical project since modernity. And then having done so, we will be able to go postmodern. But part of that involves the overthrow of capitalism. So he's explicitly not simply a linguistic philosopher or somebody worried about whether grammars are universal or culturally relative. He is someone who is doing all of that within the frame of some sort of anti capitalist, neomarxist political revolutionary agenda.
[00:48:11] Speaker A: So what about the idea that there's something to throughout history that there have been certain social mores about when someone is insane? We see the stereotype of the rich husband that could have his wife committed if she crossed him.
[00:48:32] Speaker B: Right? Yeah, no, absolutely. There are lots of horror cases in history.
So if we even look at the history of psychology as a science and psychiatry as a science, we certainly cannot say that when we started trying to be more scientific and objective about things in the 16 hundreds and the 17 hundreds that they got things right. It has been a long story of lots of failed hypotheses but nonetheless hypotheses that had traction for some generations. And part of their traction was that they did get the attention of the judicial system and led to some horrible impositions.
So we have to recognize that in many cases the science was not very scientific and that the judicial system was not very judicial, so to speak.
So what the postmoderns though want to do is to use those examples for a big generalization to say. Therefore, all of science has just been a bad science, so to speak, and bad judicial impositions, a power play for various purposes. Whereas what I think the proper reading of history is to say, well, it's taken a long time, given that both the science and the law are complicated, for us to get better and better at these things and to winnow out the bad sciences. But we are making scientific progress and we are making judicial progress, and in fact, we are being better at isolating people who are genuinely troubled in various ways and recognizing better people who are healthy and allowing a wider range of healthiness and more tolerance in the system.
[00:50:31] Speaker A: That's fair.
I do want to go to Kurt with the remaining time we have. Kurt, thanks for joining us.
You'll have to unmute your click the Mic icon. There you go.
[00:50:44] Speaker C: I'm sorry, I didn't realize you were referring to me. Apologies.
[00:50:48] Speaker A: That's all right. Go ahead.
[00:50:50] Speaker C: I don't say anything.
I'm just a fan of Stevens, and he's right about so much. And I'm such an advocate that I learned so much from that. I just wanted to see what he had to say about this matter, and as usually, he's right. So I'm sorry if I requested to speak by accident, but if I get a chance to just compliment one of my indirect mentors, I'm happy to do that.
[00:51:20] Speaker A: Anyway, thanks for that.
[00:51:22] Speaker B: I appreciate hearing that. Kirk that's great.
[00:51:26] Speaker A: Wonderful. That is great. Well, Stephen, just to follow up from your last answer, I guess part of the concern is that even today you can have these people that even have postmodernist sympathies that say, oh, well, gee, people that don't accept this are some sort of mentally ill and don't even deserve to be in regular society. It's starting to have talk like that.
[00:51:56] Speaker B: I'm sorry, can you say that again? It sounded to me like you were saying that there are people who are using the craziness of postmodern activism as an excuse to be a different kind of authoritarian.
[00:52:10] Speaker A: That's right. And they're even using the insanity language to say, oh, if you think the lab leak was true, you must be a conspiracy theorist with mental problems.
[00:52:23] Speaker B: Yes.
One of the problems is, without good, widespread standards of objectivity, then it just sets people up for a new kind of subjective authoritarianism. And if they are kind of less crazy authoritarian than some of the postmodern activists, they're going to feel that they're justified in doing so.
My sense is that right now what we have is a twofold problem. There always are going to be people who are mentally unstable, and I think there are people who are insane in various ways, and we need to know what we are doing with those people. So we need to have much better psychiatry. At the same time, I think we need to have more good standards about tolerance, about how to deal with these people better than people have been dealing with them in the past.
At the same time, I guess I want to say there's two other things that need to be agenda here. If we have not only not objective standards, we're going to have two problems. One is we're not going to be able to think that we should be trying to apply objective standards, scientifically and judicially to people who are in fact problematic.
And thereby we're going to have a whole lot more of those people just out there feeling that they can do whatever it is that they want. But probably the more serious thing is we're going to have among the intellectuals an active encouragement of those people for their kind of intellectual activist agendas. And what we have right now is both of those happening more problematic people out there being encouraged and genuinely objective tolerant people, or at least intention not knowing how to deal with them, but then a large cohort of ensconced intellectuals encouraging that development.
And then I think this then sets up for your point, Scott, that then we have throwback conservatives who don't see an alternative to just some sort of traditional authoritarianism.
[00:55:01] Speaker A: Great. Thank you for that answer. I want to go to Jacob. Jacob, you can go ahead and unmute.
[00:55:08] Speaker D: Yeah, thank you.
Well, I'm not very well versed in this stuff, but I like how Stephen laid out at least the surfery history of the subject because I'm from Denmark and last year our school system legislated into the pre university grade level to have mandatory comprehensive sex education.
And if you just do a cursory like scratching the surface, it's clearly you get to the same people Stephen is talking about and it's very clear where the ideas are stemming.
Was just my point was actually kind of in the line where Stephen left it off like the political strategy, because I looked over like Habert Marcus'repressive tolerance, where you basically get the same strategy of just reducing everything into power politics, right?
[00:56:35] Speaker B: Yes, that's right. And then the explicit use of double standards, both of which are explicitly endorsed by Derrida and Foucault.
The idea that we can't contradict ourselves or use contradictory arguments and lines of attack. Both of them want to say that is based on the idea that there is some objectivity to logic. If we really are interested in power, we should be willing to make any argument that we think will work in the context that we are in.
If people notice that we are contradicting ourselves from what we said last week, well, then we're not going to get away with it, but we will just try it again next time. But if people don't notice that we are contradicting ourselves, then we're going to be that more successful in our advocacy. So they want to argue this is a dairy doll line. The revolution against reason can use any tactic, any strategy. And Foucault says something almost exactly the same.
[00:57:42] Speaker A: Thank you. See if we can squeeze Kev in here. Kev, thanks for joining us.
[00:57:48] Speaker E: Hey, this is a cool space. Thanks for letting me not I'm not university educated and I kind of came through lesbian spaces and therefore very heavily influenced feminist spaces. I've kind of been digging into that a little bit. And I'm wondering, do you know about the onatus society or community from the 1850s? And then there was like, either a Baker or Barker farm that was kind of like gender Swappy and kind of into a lot of this. They were kind of like Lutheran. They were kind of like from the Presbyterian line, kind of kooky religious sex cults.
And there's a woman that has just a very conservative Christian woman who has kind of done a deep dive into some of the suffragette sources, original sources, and is talking about this stuff, and it's so similar. And I'm wondering because everybody kind of talks about the academic, derrida Foucault kind of influences over queer theory. And, I mean, they're really obviously there. But I'm also wondering, do you know if Foucault and the academics are aware of this 18, like, from the 1850s probably up until well, because then the homosexuality starts in the 1890s. So it kind of is all related. But the academics talk about the stuff that's happening from the 1850s in this kind of suffragette kind of it seems all very leftist revolutionary. It seems all very connected, but I don't know if people are making drawing connections to it.
[00:59:53] Speaker A: Kev, we're wrapping up. Go ahead.
[00:59:55] Speaker B: Yeah, I just want to say all of that is fascinating. I know a little bit about the American experiments. And as you're suggesting kev yes, there were quite a few Free Love utopian societies and movements in the United States in the 18 hundreds.
Free Love defined in various ways. Sometimes it was just a matter of multiple heterosexual partners. Sometimes it was more, as you're suggesting, lesbian focused or covertly homosexual male focused or gay male focused as well. My sense is that, from what I know, is that that is developing independently of anything that the Continental philosophers like Foucault and Derrida later are talking about. So we have two independent movements because in my reading of Derry Daw and Foucault, I don't recall any mentions of 19th century American Free Love or experimental sex movements. But certainly after the 1960s, when Derry Daw and Foucault become sexy, so to speak, across the Atlantic here in North America and in the Anglo American world, then you start to see a convergence of those two literatures and approaches.
[01:01:20] Speaker A: Great. Well, this has been a fantastic topic. I want to thank you, Steven. I want to thank everyone who participated or even just listened. Tomorrow at 130 p. M. The Atlas Society is doing Israel Under Siege. On the ground, an interview with Michael Kaufman. So that'll be on YouTube and Facebook and across all of our channels. You want to sing for that. But again, thank you, everyone, so much for joining us, especially Steven, and we'll look forward to seeing you at the next one.
[01:01:51] Speaker B: Take care.
