Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: I'm Scott Schiff with the Atlas Society. We are very pleased to have Atlas Society senior scholar Stephen Hicks today to discuss the topics whites did not end slavery.
After Professor Hicks'opening comments, we'll take questions from you, so just click request to speak if you have any questions, and we'll try to get to as many as possible.
Stephen, kind of an opening title. I'll let you take it away.
You'll have to unmute.
[00:00:34] Speaker B: All right, thanks for the introduction, Scott. Yes, I want to make partly a journalistic point and one conceptual point in these opening remarks and then turn things open for discussion.
In my career, I trained as a philosopher, and I've been a philosophy professor for many years, writing. I've never until recently, engaged with racial issues, partly because I don't think there are any philosophical issues about race. Philosophy operates at a level of generality and abstraction for human beings, and there are so no racial differences to the extent such things exist about epistemological standards and moral standards and so forth.
But also it was partly biographical for autobiographical for me, in that when I was growing up, I grew up in Canada, racism was not really much of an issue.
So it wasn't until the United States, when I moved here for graduate school, that I started to become aware that racial attitudes and race consciousness was much more of an issue.
And I can only when I think back on it, recall three times growing up until I was in my early twenty? S, that I kind of encountered something that was clearly racist. And I remember each time it struck me as being surprising.
So when I came to the United States, and partly I was in graduate school working in higher education, and there's a higher level of race consciousness than among intellectuals, but it was certainly an american thing. But what has led me in over the last year or two, to speak and write a little bit about racial issues has been not so much driven by philosophical considerations, but cultural considerations, that there are some intellectual, historical issues and some applied moral and cognitive issues that our current near obsession with racism and reverse racism and so on have driven. So I want to make just a couple of comments on that. Now, the point of my title, and it is meant to be an eye opener or at least an attention getter, but there, I think, is an important point about how to talk about racial issues. And we do know that for some people, race is a deep conceptual and evaluative category, and they think in terms of it, and they seem to genuinely think in terms of it. For others, it's more of a tactical weapon or a strategical weapon, making charges of racism back and forth in order to score various sorts of points and so forth. But on the issue of slavery, and I've been doing some work on the issue of slavery and why the great achievement, it's kind of an astonishing achievement given about 300,000 years of human history and slavery in pretty much every major culture that we know of, no one really having a problem with it on principle until the last couple of hundred years, when suddenly in historical time, a few lonely voices started to raise principled moral objections to slavery. You started to see organized movements against slavery and then legislation, military action over the course of the 18 hundreds to get rid of slavery in the then more civilized parts of the world. And slavery really went on the defensive and was relegated to backwaters. Now, a lot of people want to continue to blame and do blamestorming for who's responsible for the existence of past slavery. I always like to focus when I'm talking about these issues, on the amazing issue of credit and giving credit and praise to those for the first time in history, who identified slavery as a moral stain and then engaged in the activist efforts and political efforts to actually get rid of it significantly in most places in the world. So on this issue of blame and credit, this is where I want to make my conceptual point about who should get credit. And I think it's a mistake to say whites ended slavery, and I think it's the same mistake conceptually, and then by implication, rather in terms of justice, to say that whites are to blame for slavery. So the issue, and I want to give you a couple of examples, I started noticing this a couple of years ago, but I didn't keep track of it because I thought it was just some aberration. But I'm starting to see increasing references like this. So here is just one from Ida Bay Wells, who was at, and may still be at New York Times, and she's one of the lead people behind the 1619 project. And someone on Twitter was giving her some pushback on her attacks on white people as being bad and responsible for slavery, saying that this person had then said, no, it was white people who get the credit for being the first to abolish slavery. And then she was pushing back, saying, well, can you cite your source for white people being the first to abolish slavery? And the person then gave a historical source, it's a good historical source on the history of world slavery, including recent abolishment efforts, and then saying, so there we white people should get the credit for ending slavery. So it was a white versus black issue. Another one I'll just read you this. Was the person putting it in the form of a meme. More crudely, the person was saying, slavery is white history. How we survived it is black history. So here's a black person blaming slavery on white people and phrasing it in black versus white terms, and then someone responding to that saying, slavery is the entire human history. How we abolished it is white history. And so there, again, we have a pair of claims. One person wanting to say it's white people who are to blame for slavery, the other person saying, it's white people who are to get the credit for ending slavery. Now, what I want to suggest, and if necessary, argue, is that both sides of this accusation and counter accusation and credit taking are misconceived. Slavery is not a black white issue. On the one side, we know that slavery was practiced by people of all ethnicities, all cultures, or all major ones anyway. And again, to the extent that race is a legitimate biological category by all the races that we know of, so there's no one race that deserves blame for having practiced slavery. And so it's just a simple historical mistake to say that one race is to blame and excusing other ones. But then on the other side, to say that there was one race that gets the credit for ending slavery, I think that is also a mistake. And the mistake is because if you go to the 17 hundreds and you look at the people who were against slavery starting to make principled points, it wasn't only white people, again, putting that slightly in quotation marks.
There were people of several races who were involved in abolitionist movements. There were black people, there were brown people, there were yellow people, and so on. Now, it may be, and I'm going to say this as it happens, again, emphasizing these kind of scare quotient things, that a majority of the people were people who had white skin. But you also have to say, at the same time, in the 17 hundreds, there were lots and lots of people of all races, including white people, who had no problem with slavery or who were actively promoting it. So I think in the first place, it's a mistake journalistically to say that there's something about whiteness or being white that is where we should be identifying the credit for the abolitionist movement.
Sometimes we use this formulation. It's not a perfect formulation. We're saying these people were opposed to slavery and they happened to be white. And what you're trying to get to there is that they were opposed to slavery for whatever reasons they had for opposing slavery. And the fact that they were white is accidental or happenstance, but it's not the reason why they were opposed to slavery. So the point here is that looking at people's skin color or their racial grouping is not at all explanatory for why the people were opposing slavery. The people who were abolitionists, some of them were white, some of them were not white. The people who were in favor of slavery, some of them were white, and some of them were not white. That is irrelevant to the position they took with respect to slavery and abolition. So the people who were abolitionists, they were abolitionists not because they were white. They were abolitionists because they believed that all human beings should be free. That is to say, they had an idea, they had a humanistic idea, or they had an enlightenment idea, or they were followers of John Locke and believed in universal individual rights and various other figures of the Enlightenment. So, if we're giving credit, we are giving credit to people because of the ideas that they believe. That's the explanatory point, not the skin color that they happen to have. This is an analogy. Suppose we were to go back and do biographies of all of the major abolitionists, and what we looked at was the color. Not the color of their skin, but rather the texture of their hair. And it turned out, say, I'm just making this number up, that 95% of the people who were abolitionists had wavy hair or curly hair, and only 5% of them had straight hair, very straight hair. If we were then to say, wow, it was the wavies who are responsible for abolitionists, and we should be giving credit to the wavies, not the straights, for abolishing. What we're focusing on is an inessential, irrelevant factor and one that has no explanatory power. It's not the texture of their hair. That is why they are abolitionists, for the same reason it's not the color of their skin or their racial group membership that is explanatory. Now, I'm making a big deal about this point because I think it's a mistake, philosophically, in this case, conceptually, in terms of trying to explain why abolitionism came into existence. It was because of certain sets of ideas, not because certain people who predominantly had a certain skin color. So, set that aside. I also think that there is a tactical point that's important here, that if the current issue is that there are still a large number of race hustlers. Right. That's kind of a pejorative term for people who I think are using racism as a club or as a weapon in order to advance certain political and economic agendas that they have. They're trying to stoke the fires of racism for various purposes. And so they will try to use to frame rather issues in black versus white, say, to take one example and fit those two groups in adversarial relations, and then make accusations of inferiority and guilt based on that kind of framing of an issue. Now, if that framing of the issue is wrong, and I think it is wrong, then it is a mistake to accept the black versus white framing of the issue. So rather than one side saying, oh, we black people think white people are to blame, the wrong response is, as a white person or on behalf of white people, to say, no, we reject that accusation, and we think that white people are the good people. You are still then accepting the framing of the issue in black versus white terms. That's the wrong framing. The right framing is to say that this issue of slavery or the issue of universal rights or the issue of how people should decently treat each other in society, it's not a black versus white issue. It's a human issue, and race should be irrelevant to it. There are general standards of human decency, general standards of human rights. That's how we should frame the issue more appropriately. There's just one other quick variant on this I want to put out there, that sometimes people will not use the racial framing. Instead they will switch to a nationalist framing. And I don't mean that in heavy duty nationalistic terms, but just to focus on nations, or they will focus on ethnicities. So they will say, for example, the English get the credit for abolishing for slavery, or the New Englanders get the credit for being the first, or the british, or whatever the group is. I think that is fine, because, again, as a historical fact, I think it's true to say that people who were british get the lion's share of the credit, and people who were in New England get the lion's share of the credit, and some people who were in France and other places as well.
So that's fine to point that out as a historical fact. But always remember that if we want to talk about the British and their efforts to abolish slavery, that still is a shorthand tag. The british people at the time who were involved in the abolitionist movement, mobilizing the british navy, doing various acts of parliament, doing various kinds of cultural education products, it's important that they were coming from a particular culture that we call british culture. But it's not kind of a britishness per se that gets the credit. It is individual people who happen to be british. And that's important to keep in mind because at the same time, there were lots of people who were british at the time who were indifferent to the slavery issue or still in favor of the british issue. So use it as a shorthand, but beware of what often happens when ethnic labels and national labels are used in these kinds of discussions, that an implicit collectivism creeps into the discussion. All right, so that's my initial remarks and that's my explanation for the somewhat provocative title. Let me kick it back to you, Scott, and open it up for discussion.
[00:17:15] Speaker A: Great. Thank you.
Good information. We're going to bring Ajam up here in just a moment. I just want to start know in both of these cases, whether it was Nicole Hannah Jones or this uzi person saying slavery is white history, we're seeing where it's the kind of historically marginalized group that is starting it with the collective grouping and saying basically to be white is to be a supremacist, is some of what it boils down to. And then people are reacting with a collective response. But shouldn't most of our anger be towards the ones that are starting it in the first place?
[00:18:03] Speaker B: When you say starting it in the first place, what's the it, the collectivist.
[00:18:09] Speaker A: Framing or the racialist framing of history and our individual role for people that had the same skin color as our ancestors?
[00:18:19] Speaker B: Yes, I think that's always the best thing. When you notice that kind of racialist framing. Racialist, I use that because it's a little bit softer. Sometimes it is more explicitly racist framing. But yeah, to point that out and say, just to say, no, this is not a black versus white issue. This is a human rights issue or a human decency issue and discuss it only in that point, if the person doesn't want to accept that reframing, they just want to stick with their racial anger, then just don't engage with that person.
[00:18:56] Speaker A: Yeah, I can appreciate that. Until they start making policy or they talk corporations into giving them millions of dollars to like, black lives matter, that the corporations don't even care how it gets spent.
Some sense of guilt.
[00:19:16] Speaker B: Right. So then if you're not talking about an individual discussion on Twitter, if you are in a corporation or some sort of institution are becoming policies, then, yeah, then I would say to the extent you have a voice in that institution, object to that framing and in a reasonable but firm way say, no, this is the right way to frame this issue. We believe in equal standards. Equal. Equal decency with respect to all of our employees or members of the institution. And no double standards.
[00:20:00] Speaker A: I hope that can be effective. Ajam, let's go to you. Thank you for your patience.
[00:20:07] Speaker C: Thank you very much. So first of all, I'm not a music industry speaker. So sorry for my foreign dish.
I wanted to .1 thing.
USA abolished slavery in 1865. France in 1848 and British abolished in 1860, 1834. On the other side, Saudi Arabia. Sorry. Saudi Arabia abolished it in 1962.
In 1972, Moritani, or you say Mauritania in English. I don't know, 1980. So would it be fair to say that the abolition of slavery maybe do not have anything to do with white. Sorry, skin color. But also culture and religion? Because what all those countries who abolish that abolished slavery at the alias have in common. They have a european culture and a judeo christian value. Whereas the countries who abolish that abolished slavery, the latest all have islamic values. And I am an atheist, first of all. So I don't judge anything about that. So would it be fair, doctor, to say that the abolition of slavery has also to do with culture and religion?
[00:21:42] Speaker B: Yes, I agree entirely that it's not a biological thing at all, which the claims about racial differences are to boil down to. But rather it is cultural differences. I think you're pointing out the timeline of abolition. Which cultures got to abolition first and did something about it. Which cultures got there a little bit later?
That, yes, it is a matter of cultural transformations going on. Some cultures changing themselves first. And it was northwestern european cultures first that were doing so. And then as they became more influential around the world, they were influential in part in changing other cultures.
Those other cultures, sometimes voluntarily, sometimes less voluntarily adopting those northwestern european values. Now, I think northwestern european is a beginning. And you went on a little bit further. To say another hypothesis is to say it has something to do with religion, that they had judeo christian values.
I think another, stronger hypothesis is to say that those northwestern european nations were the nations of the enlightenment where religion became much less of an issue. In those culture. There was separation of church and state. There were the humanistic ideals of universal rights that had come into place. And those very quickly in the 17 hundreds became transformative of northwestern european cultures. And sometimes they work with some versions of modernized Christianity. The Quakers do need to be singled out here because they were disproportionately significant in early abolitionism. So there's something also going on in the transformations of religious cultures in northwestern Europe at the time as.
Yes, I think that's right. To say it is culture, but then culture is still a very broad label. What parts of culture was it philosophical culture? Was it political culture, religious culture?
More drilling down is the right way to go.
[00:24:17] Speaker C: I think, as you pointed out, it has to do more in Europe, in the northern part of Europe, with the rise of humanism, the period we call the renaissance in France, where we decided to basically cut, I would say, to stay away from religion.
That's the beginning of enlightenment, and that's also, to my point of view, the beginning of abolition.
[00:24:46] Speaker B: Yes, I agree with that. I think that's correct.
You find a few lonely voices here and there objecting to slavery across the centuries. Most of the time they are objecting because they don't want to be slaves. But sometimes it's people who are themselves not slaves, and they're making objections that slavery is too barbaric or that some people were not justly brought into slavery, the idea being still pretty universal, that if you were conquered in war, that it was part of the natural or divine order, that, of course, you could be taken into slavery.
But then in the 15 hundreds and the 16 hundreds, you do find some mostly humanistic, educated individuals. Let's say that they were fully humanistic. Some of them were still quite religious, but they had had a renaissance humanistic education as well, who started to raise more serious moral doubts about it. Then, by the time you get into the 16 hundreds, even more individuals. And then it's not until the 17 hundreds that you start to see movements form activist societies directed toward the abolition of slavery. And then, going back to your opening remarks, it's really not until the 18 hundreds that we really see the first political movement that actually is not quite correct. I think there were a couple of the US states, like Vermont, that in the late 17 hundreds, when they were still autonomous or sovereign nations that get the credit for abolishing slavery first. And I think France also did in the late 17 hundreds, but it backslid and reintroduced slavery in the early 18 hundreds. So, yes, I think the timing and the timeline works out to support your hypothesis.
[00:26:53] Speaker C: Thank you very much, doctor. I am arriving at my job place. So thank you for the microphone and thank you for your lecture. That was really.
[00:27:01] Speaker B: Thank you.
[00:27:02] Speaker A: Thank you. And if you want to ask a question, you can raise your hand. I've got some other questions as know just off that last one. I mean, how would you respond to people that say that, oh, it's racialist? The enlightenment only happened in Europe because of the bounty of.
Know that what's attributed to ideas is really just what today know. White privilege.
[00:27:38] Speaker B: I think I need to have that focused a little bit more. The bounty of slavery made possible. The enlightenment. That's the claim.
[00:27:47] Speaker A: Well, that there was this extra leisure time to people to even be able to focus on ideas so much.
[00:28:00] Speaker B: I think then we'd have to look at lots of other cultures that had an educated leisure class that lots and lots of them across history, that never did generate such an idea. So you'd still have to say why this particular leisured group of people came up with that idea. Just having leisure time doesn't seem like a sufficient explanation.
[00:28:27] Speaker A: Okay, that's fair.
[00:28:28] Speaker B: I would also say, actually, a lot of the people who were early abolitionists were not leisured people per se, but people who were very busy in their careers and had busy lives.
I'm thinking of some of the.
In the 1500, some of the portuguese explorer types who raised their voices.
Anyway, I don't want to set this hypothesis you're suggesting aside too quickly. I'm actually curious how it would be worked out a little more so I would know what the premises are and what the claim causation is. Yeah.
[00:29:07] Speaker A: I'm just imagining how a kind of CRT type would try to be dismissive of the role of enlightenment.
It's not my theory.
[00:29:21] Speaker B: Yeah. So in that case, you would have someone who's saying, okay, yes, it did happen during the enlightenment, and it was enlightenment figures who get the credit, but then they would be trying to find ways to be ad hominem about the enlightenment or diminish the achievement by saying, in some sense, I don't know, I'm just making stuff up as well.
They were only able to think of those ideas because they were living off the backs of slaves. In some ways, that's what I was trying to get.
I don't. I don't know what that would mean.
[00:30:00] Speaker A: All right, well, I'll try to debate a lefty about it and see what.
[00:30:03] Speaker B: They throw at me, see what they come up with.
[00:30:06] Speaker A: Well, we're very pleased to have Atlas society founder David Kelly here.
Dr. Kelly, thank you for joining us.
You will have to unmute.
[00:30:20] Speaker D: Yes, thank you.
Okay. Thank you, Scott. Thank you, Stephen.
Fascinating topic. Stephen, I have a question.
The cot people that you mentioned at the beginning who are saying, know all whites are inherently racist and everything is to be cast in racial terms, that seems to me unbelievably stupid.
Unbelievably stupid. I mean, it's not the only thing around that I feel that way about, but it stands out. And a lot of the history, even some who's not as versed in history as you are, knows perfectly well that it's not a white black issue, despite the american experience, where most of people who were enslaved were black because they came from Africa. But nevertheless, when I encounter something that I think is just incredibly stupid and also prevalent, I want to know.
So imagine that there's someone from that point of view in the room with us.
There isn't. Probably not. But any what? Stephen, if you were sitting down with such a person, what kind of arguments would you think they would raise? And let me just give you a framework. Do you think there's a genetic thing about whites that makes them racist and black people somewhat better, or is it all cultural?
I'll leave it there.
[00:32:04] Speaker B: Yeah.
Well, I think you're right. I think it is stupid at one level, and also it is historically uninformed, although I think there is another category. You start to talk about them.
They historically know better, but something else is going on with them, either some psychological issues or some political agenda that they just set aside whatever historical knowledge they have, or they want to distort the historical knowledge.
I'll come back to that in a minute. But your comment reminds me that I think my primary motivation for doing this session was not so much to analyze those people, but to warn people against falling into that trap of accepting the framing. So it would be that we're running into more and more people who are racialists in their thinking, and they have more platforms, as Scott is pointing out, they are becoming institutionalized in corporations and politics. So there's more and more of it around. And I have a little worry about there being a kind of reactionary or revenge rhetorical strategy that people try to accept the black white framing and then just to start arguing on behalf of whites and to keep it as a black versus white issue. So just as a temptation to avoid. Now, what you're asking then at the tail end is if we try, as philosophers or psychologists or biologists, as informed people, to take seriously the claim that there is something inherently wrong with whites, that whites are collectively racist and therefore collectively guilty, where exactly is that? Is it built into white genes? Is it built into, or kind of now baked into something called white culture such that whites consciously or unconsciously get conditioned by it when they are growing up? I think one would see both versions of that. I think there are people who believe that there are intrinsic racial differences, and they then want to cast some races in a superior or inferior position. So some of them will accept that there are racial differences between white, brown, black, yellow, red, and so on, and just reverse what has been a recent pattern. Instead of just saying that whites are biologically or genetically superior, to say that whites are genetically inferior and to try to get some satisfaction out of that, I think there are other ones, and I see this in the CRT, the critical race theory and critical feminist theories as well, where both of them, they go back and forth. There are subschools. Some of them will emphasize the biological basis, but that tends to be a minority. Most of them are coming out of social conditioning, various forms of environmental determinism. And so what they typically will do when they get pushed on this is say that in the wrong culture, if it's male culture, or in this case, if it's white culture, it's something that has just been so baked into the culture for so long and operates at an unconscious level that you might as well just say that it's part of that identity without necessarily making a strong genetic claim. But let me stop there. I don't know that I addressed all of what you were saying in your comment, David, so let me ask if you want to follow up on that.
[00:36:42] Speaker A: I'm not sure if he may have stepped away for a moment, but you are muted. But in the meantime, let me just follow up on that to say, okay.
[00:36:53] Speaker D: Scott, I just unmuted. Sorry.
I do have a follow up, and I want to appeal to one of themes that in Atlas shrugged in elsewhere.
[00:37:05] Speaker B: That.
[00:37:08] Speaker D: There'S an aspect of the moral code, altruist moral code, that elevates the people, considered widely at the bottom, the victims, and treats them as victims, whereas the rich people. It's harder for a rich person to get to heaven than through a camel, through the eye of a needle. And there's an inversion of values here that you talked about where being smart, intelligent, beautiful or successful doesn't make you a good person, but it doesn't mean you're a bad person either. And so she calls it kind of an inversion of values, where victims get honored and celebrated at the expense of anyone regarded as an oppressor as better. And that runs across so many issues.
I think it has to do with the anti semitism we're seeing today because the Jews have been so successful, especially in Israel. It pertains to black and white in particular. Our topic tonight, and I'm just wondering whether you see influences of that as part of the cultural influences that lead people to the view we're addressing. The CRT types yeah, I think that's.
[00:38:46] Speaker B: A hugely important part of it. The inversion of values, where in this strong form of altruism, it is the weaker that is to be valorized, and that there's always suspicion attached to the stronger. I think that works hand in hand with what might be the deeper and more universal element, which is the collectivism.
I think the altruism is in western civilizations, partly because of today or christian inheritance. But my sense is that across the globe, there still is a significant amount of collectivism. That young kids, what they learn from a very early age is that their ethnic identity and or their religious identity is fundamental at first. And they really learn to think of themselves as part of a group.
And then when they get a little older, part of their conditioning is to say that there are all of these other groups out there, and we are in adversarial conflict, relationships with those other groups.
This is not yet to think in terms of altruism, but it's our group versus those other groups. And whether our group is doing better or worse relative to those other groups becomes the most important issue.
And I think the way it typically starts, though, is that there is the idea that I want to have a kind of self esteem in my life. I want to think well of myself. But what that means is I need to get that by my group being strong and successful.
And I'm going to then get my reflected self worth or my group self worth. Then what happens with many groups that have not been too successful is they get a kind of wounded pride when they realize that their group lost historically, or is backward, or is behind the times. And all of these other groups that they have been taught are their enemies, have been a whole lot more successful. And so they go from striving for a kind of self esteem through thinking of their group as being strong and excellent, to realizing that their group is weak. And then so they start to feel inferior. And then that wounded self esteem can lead to some pretty ugly psychological things.
And I think one of the things that then can happen is they can start working when they hear about altruism as a moral code. And that there are lots and lots of people who will give you special privileges and bend over backwards to be nice to you. If you are a member of a weaker group, then they will start using that as a strategic tactic. But on that hypothesis, it's the collectivism that is deeper and stronger.
So the altruism that comes along as a tactical or a strategical weapon that works with it.
[00:42:11] Speaker D: So I hear what you're saying, is that what we used to call, or maybe still do, tribal identity politics is not just political. It goes deep into the cultural realm. Yes.
But just by contrast, think about the attitudes toward Asians in the late 19th century. There was a chinese exclusion act, and they were looked down on, and now no one is coming to their defense because they're so successful.
[00:42:45] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:42:47] Speaker D: Okay. Anyway, thanks, Steven. That's your analysis, I think, is.
[00:42:54] Speaker B: Thanks.
I remember some years ago at my university, we were having an event my center sponsored, and somehow we got talking about european politics and european culture and people from quite a few different cultures, and we started talking. I don't know how the conversation got there about the English and their battle against the spanish armada and how the spanish armada was sunk and they lost. And they went from being the superpower of the time to into a decline phase as the British were rising and so on. And I remember one spanish guy there who was really upset with this. And for most of it, it was just an interesting historical thing, but it bothered him.
And he got angry at this being pointed out that the Spanish had lost this major war. And what came out, the more he talked was that he thought of himself first and foremost as a spanish person and that his identity and his pride was as a spanish person. And the fact that Spain used to be great, but it had declined was really wounding to him, and he just didn't want that history to be true.
So that's just one example. But I see it sometimes in arabic cultures and persian cultures, where people will glorify their history, and it really matters to them and bothers them that they see their culture as having been in decline. And it's like they, as individuals, feel inferior because their culture has gone through a decline phase.
[00:44:50] Speaker D: Yeah, that's right. I remember something bin Laden said after 911. He referred to the tragedy of Andalusia, that is that the Arabs were driven out of Spain. And I thought, holy cow, he's still brooding over something that happened. What was it, 700 years ago?
Anyway, thanks, David.
[00:45:17] Speaker B: Yeah. Just another anecdote, but one that always sticks with me. It has to do with my father and my mother. They made a trip to Ireland some years ago, and they had a rental car. They were driving around all over the place, and apparently they were staying at a bed and breakfast, but they went past frequently some gypsies. And these were like irish gypsies who had a horse drawn caravan, and they would just park in some farmer's field for a while and stay there for a week or two until the farmer asked them to move on. So my dad was always one of these guys who would just talk to anybody and become instant friends. So he stopped and started talking to the father, saying, asking him about his lifestyle, noticing there was the kids, why aren't your kids in school? And all this, that and the other thing. The guy started telling a story. He said, well, I would like my kids to go to school, and I would like to have a better life for my family. But we lost our land, and so we've been forced into this kind of nomadic lifestyle. And my dad was saying, oh, my, that's terrible that you lost your land, and, well, who took your land from you? And he says, well, it's the damned English who took our land.
But I said, oh, that's really bad. The guy was saying how much he hated the English. And eventually my dad asked, well, so when did you guys lose your land? And the guy said. Scratched his head for a moment. He said, it was 1640s. So for this guy's way of thinking and his whole lifestyle has to go back to, like, 300 years ago. The English did some bad things to his ancestors, and as a result of that, he now feels like a victim who has to live that kind of lifestyle, and he still hates the English for it. So that's a kind of collectivism. I don't know if it's tribal, but that's deep, and that's in a lot of places around the world.
[00:47:19] Speaker A: Great. Well, we're very pleased to have another senior scholar with us, Professor Richard Salzman.
Thank you for joining.
[00:47:29] Speaker E: Thank you, Scott. David, in mentioning to Stephen the idea of how can there be such overtly stupid know by CRT people, I'm reminded of there's a line in the fountainhead, but I can't remember who said it. But it's a great line. It's something like, don't bother to examine a folly. Only ask what it accomplishes. So we hear follies all the time, right? We hear crazy, stupid stuff.
But if you flip beyond that and say, well, what are they trying to do? Is it possible to just say, okay, disclaim that there's white privilege everywhere, and it's unavoidable?
The real thing is they're trying to accomplish something. And my guess would be they're trying to put whole groups of people on their heels, apologetic, obsequious, feeling guilty. So in other words, they don't really believe it. David. They're saying stupid things. They don't believe it, but they have an agenda. And the difficulty I've always faced is you say something like this, people will say, you can't question people's motives. You have to take their claims on the face of it. But I think Ein Rand was known for saying people are motivated in nefarious ways to do certain things. Malevolence, malevolent universe, nihilism. So I just throw that out there because when I see stupidity, I flip to the fountainhead quote and say, what are these people trying to accomplish with their foolishness?
[00:49:05] Speaker B: Yeah, I think that's exactly okay. Steven Richard, that's exactly right. I have a crude distinction between the average Twitter user or social media person who says stupid things. I think a lot of that just is low grade tribalism, and I dismiss it as such. When you elevate it and you start talking about people who are intellectuals and professors who are kind of card carrying members of CRT, critical race theory, I think these people do know better. And in their cases, they are using the race card as a rhetorical weapon, and they do know better. They know the history, but they go out of their way to obfuscate the history, and they know all of the rhetorical tactics. And they do know that, as you put it, it puts a lot of people back on their heels. Now, at the same time, dwelling on the negative here. One of the things I think is encouraging, though, is that we are, I think, for the last eight to ten years, having a racialist moment, if I can call it that, where there is this big upsurge in talk about race and race issues and institutional racism, or not black lives matter, critical race theory, the history of slavery, and so on. And my sense is that this is all to the good, because what it has given millions of people an opportunity to do is actually learn some history that they didn't learn in high school or anywhere in their formal education. But now, because these issues are being discussed by tens and hundreds of millions of people around the world, the historical facts do come out, the memes do come out, the graphs do come out, and I think we will emerge better informed and stronger for it. I agree, Steven.
[00:51:10] Speaker E: I agree entirely. Thanks.
[00:51:14] Speaker A: Great.
And I want to encourage others if you have questions, to raise your hand, but let me just ask, can we at least notice patterns or similarities in cultural groups? I know some irish guys that drink and fight a little bit without it, meaning it's all of them, or I don't trust them.
[00:51:38] Speaker B: Are there cultural patterns?
Absolutely, there are cultural patterns, and I think that's part of what anthropology and sociology can and should properly be doing.
And then taking culture, which is still a very broad label, and breaking it down to its component elements, language and religion, and people's sense of their own history, and modes of dress and cuisine, and sporting practices and food and drink practices and so on, all of those things are legitimate areas of study, and in varying degrees, all add up to what we call culture.
And I do think that a lot of times, the stereotypes that we all are aware of do have some basis in reality.
[00:52:42] Speaker D: Can I just say something to Stephen Scott?
I don't want to consume too much time. But the positive side of what Stephen is saying is that all these cultural differences between Italians, Japanese, Chinese, English, French, whatever, there are different styles and different cultures and personalities that are typical of those cultures. And that's know people who have a cosmopolitan, to use the term, that one of our fellow scholars, Jason Hill, has used, is a way of appreciating a wider world of human possibility. And just the talents, the passions, different.
What I've called the salt of jewish humor, the passion of Italians and the cooking of French, all that stuff is, I could do any of those things, but I can't do all of them. And so it's a way of appreciating the diversity of human culture and the contributions that different. It's like a cultural division of labor, I guess I could call it, and with the same values as the economic division of labor.
That's all.
[00:54:18] Speaker B: Yeah, nicely said.
[00:54:22] Speaker A: Great.
In a place where being a racist is the worst thing that you can be called, aren't there different degrees of racism? It's just where someone saying, oh, he doesn't look like me. Strange. I'm going to be cautious to, I want to go out and kill everyone that looks like him.
[00:54:46] Speaker B: Yeah, I think for sure, if we take racism as a concept, for sure, it's going to come in degrees. There are some people who just easily adopt certain kinds of stereotypes.
Sometimes it's a more perceptual thing of having not been raised around people with different skin colors. So you're naive and you notice things in an overt way compared to someone blase, because they've been raised around people from all over the world, to stronger things, where you start ascribing cognitive differences or moral differences, to even more stronger thing, where you start acting on the basis of that, treating people differently on the basis of your racial categorizations, to even stronger things, where you start trying to pass laws. So I think, yes, all of that would be part of a full kind of sociology of what goes on in people who are racists.
[00:56:06] Speaker A: Great.
You alluded to revenge racism.
Is it fair to maybe say postmodernism and or CRT is kind of an intellectual rationalization for that?
[00:56:23] Speaker B: I think so, yes, for sure.
I think revenge racism comes out when one has acquired a racial identity. You think of yourself in some important way as a member of a race, and you pin your identity and worth on your racial grouping, and then you are a member of a group that you think has been rightly or wrongly beaten up on by history, by other groups, and you think that that's wrong, and it was historically wrong, whether you individually were affected by it or not. And so you want, on behalf of your group, to make up for that in some way, and revenge is one way of doing so. Now, I think that can be kind of a low grade, and there's lots of low grade revenge racism out there. But I do think that many of the intellectual strategies that are being developed by CRT types, they are enemies of the enlightenment and the achievements of enlightenment. And part of the enlightenment is this idea of universal rights of individuals.
And if you want to attack that principle, then reviving various forms of racism is useful.
It can be a very good strategic weapon, particularly in a culture like ours, where accusations of racism are taken very seriously, and many people often unjustifiably, feel some guilt over historical acts of racism.
Yes, I think we bend racism. I don't know if I made up that term or not, but it is one that I think is useful to describe it, that strategy.
[00:58:41] Speaker A: Great.
Also, you spoke of the double standard that the historically marginalized groups, they say, can't be racist or bigoted. Doesn't that create its own kind of imbalance when discussing these issues?
[00:59:02] Speaker B: Yes, that one doesn't come out of critical race theory directly, although critical race theories have adopted it. That's something that comes straight out of postmodernism, where you get rid of truth and objectivity, standards of justice and goodness, and you reduce everything to power. So power becomes your operative explanatory concept, and then it becomes a matter of who has more power and who has less power. And then the double standard falls out of that, where you just say, the strong will always use, there always will be a double standard, one standard that the strong have for themselves and a standard that they use when they're dealing with the weak.
But then if you are, you see yourself as allied with the weaker victimized groups. This goes back to David's earlier point. Then you will just adopt that double power standard on behalf of your group. So you will use accusations against what you think of as the dominant oppressor group, but excuse your own group from having to live up to that standard.
[01:00:19] Speaker A: Well, this has been a great discussion. Thank you so much. Next Wednesday at 05:00 p.m. The Atlas Society asks Rand biographer Jennifer Burns. And then next Wednesday at 630 eastern p. M. Back here on spaces, Rob Trozinski will be doing the one big thing you're getting wrong about consciousness. So we hope you'll join us for that. Thanks to everyone who joined, listened, asked questions, and we'll look forward to seeing you on the next one. Take care. Thanks, Stephen.
[01:00:52] Speaker B: Thanks, Scott.
