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good evening and welcome to Nevada I've

been looking forward to for a very long

time my apologies for that little thing over

there I just can't stand people like

- agent I'll be your emcee for the night

a founding partner of Capitol events and

a veteran member of the UBC these are

two organizations of the base night

possible tonight we hope further our

ideals is not partisanship and the commitment to open dialogue on the

subject of post-modernism as over the

course of last few years as relevance has become rather significant in public

discourse that's gonna open the show

well anecdote I came to be the story self is always important what's

important is the message as this this

night couldn't hug me possible without

the dedication and perseverance of a

team working towards a goal our human

ability to create to make it a challenge

is what drives us one of the main

reasons why I got involved in the free

speech Club to begin with is because I

couldn't stand to see those taking life

now I believe in this notion because our

speaker today understand supports drama

understand support of perseverance and I'm very happy that through months of

effort and playing we were able to make

this night possible 36 is a

canadian-born foster a professor at

Rockford University named on the way

holds a PhD in philosophy and it's the

author of numerous works that range from each new philosophy to business ethics

he comes here today all the way from going to speak on the postmodern theory

but I further do may resent you the

author of the work that you are I'm a

modern man at postmodern world don't you

all right thank you for the invitation

and the gracious introduction

yes challenging times for free speech

obviously more broadly challenging times

for education and here we are University

events like we just witnessed are in

some sense regular common occurrences

for a generation one sided reading lists

right an attempt by intellectuals and

professors to take entire traditions of

understanding and not have them be taught more recently activist student

groups by trying intentionally to shut

down the views of those they disagree

with including professors right in their

own universities who will include books

that they do not want to have taught

invite speakers whom they do not want to

have taught now of course traditionally

conservative professors have been the first ones to be targeted right in this

way and conservative traditions but over

the last couple of decades we've also

seen this extended to more broadly

libertarian thinkers classically liberal

thinkers and then as things accelerate

thinkers who are broadly speaking on the

left but who are not left enough right

from the perspective of the given

activist group to the point where

professors who have been invited right

by the university are disinvited those who are invited are subject to shouting

down and sometimes to overt physical

threatening people arriving right at

university events for God's sake

carrying weapons and occasionally

violence breaking out now this is

bewildering right to those people who

are outside of the Academy and in many

cases bewildering to people inside the

Academy and the reason for this is that

universities are experimental

laboratories they're experimental

laboratories for ideas and when a

certain set of ideas or a network of

ideas get purchased they get traction

and of course naturally they want to propagate themselves and exclude the

competition and what we are seeing in

the last decade is a leveraging of a very

prominent set of ideas that has taken

hold in the last two generations

particularly in the humanities right

that we call post-modernism now

post-modernism is partly a philosophical

label partly a historical label right

post-modernism right whatever modernism

is and so that's our subject tonight and the claim I want to make is that the

pathological manifestations that we are

starting to see the threats to the

ideals of liberal education free speech

discourse being willing to engage in the

give-and-take of heated argument on

important matters all of that is currently up for grabs because we are

postmodern right now what does this mean

well post-modernism of course is a

sprawling label it's an intellectual

movement it's a cultural movement but

when we survey the landscape all of the

post modernists first tier second tier third tier cite the big guns right the

big names whom we are supposed to know

if we are well-educated people so the

names like Michel Foucault Richard Rorty

Jacques Derrida jean-francois Leo tar

right and others I consistently come to

the fore as the leading intellectual

heavyweights guiding this movement so I

want to start with a sampling of some

quotations from leading postmodern

thinkers so here's Michele Foucault on

the end of modernity he starts with a

geological right metaphor the deepest

strata of Western culture have been

exposed and of course this is what

philosophical individuals do and

intellectuals do you drill down to the

bedrock right the basic assumptions and

you think about those you try to find

alternatives you put them to the test and the claim is the bedrock right of

modernity right has been exposed and are

once more stirring under our feet so we

are in earthquake times right the modern

world is being subject to fundamental

shocks right to the system Richard Rorty

agreeing saying the postmodern task

right as he called it is to figure out what

to quote now that both the age of faith

and so we pause there they face perhaps

thousand years of Western history if we

take the Eurocentric or Western

perspective right at this point the

decline of Rome the collapse of Rome on

through Renaissance and Reformation that

was the age of faith in which

essentially a religiously based philosophy was dominant intellectually

and dominant culturally but that failed

right that's Rory's first point and the

in lage SR and the Enlightenment right

seem to be beyond recovered the

Enlightenment right kind of a capstone

intellectual and cultural movement in the modern world again historians will

argue maybe 1600s but certainly belongs

1700s and early 1800s the Age of

Enlightenment but the claim is that to

write has failed so what has gone on

essentially up up to R or D and fuko's

generation mid to late 20th century is

the entire history intellectual and

cultural history right of the West going

back to the fall of the Roman Empire the

two dominant paradigms or philosophical

outlooks have both been tried and then

found wanting failure and now we are

casting around what should we do next

and that will be the postmodern cast what will we do next

now Foucault Frenchmen Rorty American

this is an international movement so

here's John Gray a Brit we live today

amid the dim ruins of the Enlightenment

project agreeing with word II which was

the ruling project of the modern period

now this is a slightly stronger claim it's not just that the Enlightenment

failed as an intellectual movement right

but rather enlightenment transformed

culture and the institutions that we

live in and those have reached a

pathological state an end state I said when we look around us the claim is we

ruins that we live in effect a ruined

culture and the postmodern position is

to recognize this and to react to that

alright Enlightenment's wake yeah so

what is enlightenment waked by going to

be that is the postmodern right predicament so what's the Enlightenment

right well there's some history here I

realize given this here that the font is

a little small but I wanted to get all this in so let me talk you this through

this enlightenment vision as both Rorty

and gray and Foucault right agree said that is the ruling project of the modern

era and we are trying to define

post-modernism so what is modernism

right and what was this enlightenment

philosophy or framework that tried to

summarize and institutionalize what the modern world right is all about first a

philosophical revolution I want to go

back to this early 1600s and I've got

three names here Francis Bacon Rene

Descartes right John Locke so if you take courses

in early modern intellectual history and

particularly if you studied modern philosophy the transition to modern

philosophy is identified with these

formative figures Francis Bacon and John Locke both into

Frenchmen typically Rene Descartes is

given the the honorific title the father

right of modern philosophy I think

therefore I am cogito ergo soom right and all of that

sort of stuff why is that fundamental

why our intellectual historians willing

to cite these individuals as the

founding fathers of the modern world and

the claim we'll make is that all of them

are advocates fundamentally of reason

that human beings have the capacity for

reason and if we're interested in knowing what's true what's false what we

should believe right what we should put in action right and stake our lives on

should be primarily through the guidance

of reason now from our perspective

that's not necessarily a radical

sounding claim but if you go to the

early modern world

this was a dramatic claim human beings

have the capacity for reason it works

and we ought to use it fundamentally the

contrast then is to what had been the

dominant theory of knowledge or the dominant epistemology of the previous

era the age of faith right the one that already alluded to if you want to know

the fundamental truths and what you

should believe and what you should stake

your life on it has to be an act of faith not an act of reason and what are

you having faith in well you have a

couple of options and there are widespread theological debates that are

dominated for a thousand years do you

have faith in the church as the

institutional vehicle for the true

religion right but what is the turk's

based on well the church is based on a long lineage right that goes back to

Scripture and so ultimately scripture is

your authority and you accept the truth

of Scripture on faith well what is this

faith in Scripture right based on why

should we accept that of course we ask

the standard question and the claim is again a non rational one that there are

certain prophets who in ancient times

were visited directly by God and or one

of God's angels or emissaries and God

spoke directly to those individuals and

they recorded in some way what God said

and then passed it on and those of us

who have not had such direct

communications from God except that they got it right on in faith so ultimately

it's either a mystical revelation or

faith in some thing that can be traced

back to a mystical revelation that is where we get our important knowledge

from and that was the dominant framework

for the age of faith the moderns

challenge that and reject that we do not

believe in mystical revelations we do

not believe on the basis of faith there

might be a place for these things but they're going to be secondary tertiary

and we are going to bracket them as much

as possible and rely on our own capacity

for reason for really during out what is true so this is a bit

of a mischaracterization of Descartes

but the rhetoric is perfect here right I

think right therefore I am right those

rungs sounding words right all that if you take that as axiomatic is to say I

think right and that is core to my

humanity my capacity for thinking my

very being is wrapped up in my capacity

for being able to do this sort of thing

Francis Bacon making similar kinds of

arguments about the foundation of Reason and working out an early version of

scientific method John Locke in a more

mature fashion later in the century also

an advocate right of reasoning

bargaining explicitly that we have to go

by our own experience other people's

experience doesn't do you any good the

fact that something is true and somebody else believes it it doesn't do you any

good right you have to figure it out for

yourself by the exercise of Reason and

it is a human birthright that we all

have the capacity for this and this is

what has to be trained and exercised

this has of course huge implications for

education right if we think that human beings all of them have the capacity for

reason that education is not a matter of

here are the truths that you accept on

faith go out and live them up after having learned them rather were training

people to think and to utilize their own

experience and become so to speak

scientists in their own lives that was

hotly contested right for a century now

century is not a very long time in human

history larly for philosophical debates

but the early modern 's won the debate

right and the advocates of faith the

advocates of mysticism the advocates of

reliance upon traditional institutions

were on the defensive intellectually speaking now this is important and I

want to put the dates to here this is

Francis Bacon I've put 1620 here because

that is the date of his first

significant publications or one of his

significant Descartes publishing in the 1640s Locke publishing in the 1690s but

actually doing is writing in the decade before when he was in exile in Holland

because he was on the wrong side of

various political conspiracies and

while but notice the dates here are

sixteen hundred's that's important yeah

now what happens as a consequence if you

think fundamentally that the human

rational capacity is most foundational

and that that needs to be exercised well

that has huge implications if you then

take the rational capacity or capacity for reason and turn it to understanding

the world you don't have a magical

understanding of the world right or you

don't necessarily interpret everything

that goes on in the world in terms of

omens and signals right from God you try to understand it on its own rational

terms well you start to see the beginnings of science and it is then not

an accident right historically that it's

in the mid 1600s that we start to see

the first kind of recognizably modern

scientific fields coming into existence

astronomy and physics are the first major battle grounds but astronomy and

physics right in modern terms require an

epistemology of reason and so physics

becomes institutionalized starting in

the 1600s capstone names

I really should probably have Galileo up

here Galileo also did yeoman worked right

here a little bit earlier didn't work

out for Galileo very well because he was

silence but by the time we get to the

second part of the 1600s we've got Isaac

Newton right towering figure right with

a very mature physics right in place awesome things being done in mathematics

right by both Newton and Leibniz and any

number of other people then it's a

matter of generations by the time we get

another 40 or 50 years you can see

chemistry right coming online it's

separating itself out from alchemy and

magical understandings of how the

elements work and then another 50 years

later biology right is coming online and

so by the time we get into the 1700s we

have recognizably the sciences of

physics cosmology chemistry biology all

of it supported by an understanding that

reason is fundamental and we are working

out what this means or scientific method

we also then see

we get into the 1700s right he's started

to be applied to more systemic areas if

you take science physics chemistry and

you apply it to understanding right

thermodynamics right then you get the

Industrial Revolution the Industrial

Revolution was a lot of inventors of course working in their garages right in

workshops but a lot of it was very

theoretical science right that was

discovered and people were looking for ways to apply this and it's not an

accident then that the Industrial

Revolution is first happening in England

because England was the first nation of

the Enlightenment right Newton bacon

Locke right are all right Englishmen so

if you apply reason to the manufacture

of goods right in the making right of

machines well then engineering right as a discipline and all of the various

kinds of engineering disciplines start to professionalize themselves and our

big capstone label for that is the

Industrial Revolution James Watt 1769

with the first right commercially

feasible right steam engine right there

was one that actually had more energy

output than energy right as as input but

a century of amazing cleverness with

respect to industrial gadgets and as a

result of that the number of material

goods that are produced for people it

just starts to skyrocket so from

philosophers arguing about epistemology

to scientists working out the physics

and chemistry to engineers right putting these things into practice and making

machines that can produce awesome down

amounts of good we see that trend line

in place and the data are very good that by the time the 1700s comes up stuff is

being produced on a historically

unprecedented scale right cotton right

for all human beings to wear dinner

plates the fact that you can put glass

right in your in your window right all

the things that we started to take for granted right in the modern world were

first mass-produced in England and then

places that were influenced that by that by the 1700s now if you do the same

thing you take science and you start to

apply it to human beings human beings

are more complicated than machines but you get away from again magical and

types of understandings of why people get sick alright we're not getting sick

because God is punishing us right for

various things or we're not healthy

because God has favoured us right we're looking for naturalistic rational

scientific understandings right for

various things and you start to see

there's late 1600s and all through the

1700s a transformation of the medical

profession and putting increasingly on

scientific footing medical chemistry

with Lavoie ze Edward Jenner and the

smallpox vaccination a huge right lifesaver I don't know if you can

imagine right being the first person to

inject yourself right with with

something that you know right came from a sick person who died of a particular

disease because you've got the

confidence right the rational confidence

right you've done the numbers you've

done the experiments that it's going to work so he is a great hero right of

vaccination science but these are two

guys right I'm singling out here and

then again the empirical data is very good are a human life expectancy for

most of human history right was in the

20s right it wasn't until the 1500s that

had got up into the 30s right and then starting at the late 1700s we see that

number going up right steadily right and

so forth directly as a result of this so people are living longer they're living

healthier partly because of medical

chemistry were in less pain in a lot of

cases and the story is increasingly

progressive and we have more stuff right

available to us now the same thing

though occurs if you take reason right

as fundamental and you don't emphasize

that we're trying to understand the

world out there right scientifically but we apply reason to ourselves and we take

as the important foundational failure

that every individual has the capacity

for reasoning what does that imply for the normative side right of our

well it is an immediate or at boost to

individualism because we're getting away from the idea that only certain special

individuals have received insights from

and everybody else is in ignorant and

everybody else should be faithful with respect to those people who have the

special institution are the special

insights or that only an elite number of

people are the heirs of certain traditions that have come down right

over the centuries and if you are not an

authorized official right of one of

those institutions then you should have faith in those authorized individuals

what we are saying is every individual

has his and increasingly her own brain

and can use it to figure out the way the

world works and governs their life and

that means that the respect for each

individual's thinking starts to increase

explicitly and dramatically now one sign

of this is a whole series of political

institutions you start to see I've got

John Locke here again in 1690 the first

major battles in this were in religion

so if we just take this argument about

what your religious views should be and

how should we think about religion and

deal with the fact that we have differing views right about religion and

we know that historically right the

standard answer has been we disagree on

religion therefore I need to kill you or

I need to torture you right to get you

to believe it of course you're trying to

do the same sort of thing for me but if

the point is that religion is important

it's important for people to know the

truth right about whether there really is a God and which one is the right god and

what that correct God said that it

doesn't do you any good just to take

this on faith that you have to figure it out for yourself and that you're not

right with God so to speak unless you

have the right attitude right toward if

you're just mouthing words that you've heard from other people that's not

legitimate but if you have convinced yourself of the truth of a certain

position then that's genuine right and

that needs to be respected but what this

means though of course is that we know

people are going to when they start

thinking for themselves disagree with

each other right and so you and I might might come to a point where I really

think that my position is true on this

and you do you think your position is true on this but what's going to stop me from

torturing you and what's going to stop

me from trying to kill you is the belief

that you are a being of reason and your

religion is not going to do you any good

unless you really believe it by your own

lights and that means I have to respect

the fact that you disagree with me on

this that's the more important thing

because if I try to torture you into it that's not going to do you any good and

if we're supposed to be as part of our

religion benevolent and love our fellow

mankind then tolerance becomes

absolutely essential the arguments for

tolerance that carried the day in

England and in Holland right in there

late in the 1600s that's a direct

implication here and that is a

historically almost unprecedented right

achievement right religious tolerance if

you are familiar with religious history right very few cultures very short times

but in the modern world that came about

here obviously this has political

implications if you think if you're going to leave people's religious lives

up to themselves as individuals to work

it out well then what about their

political lives what about their economic lives it's not a big stretch to

say we should also get away from

feudalism right where we tell people what they can and can't do with whom

they can trade what prices they can set we will leave people up to make their

own decisions about what they're going

to make whom they're going to trade with right and so forth and so we started to

see the institutions of modern

capitalism and I don't think again it's

accidental Adam Smith on The Wealth of

Nations published in 1776 if you make

the same applications with respect to

politics well right politics again right

should not be a matter of right elite

leadership our politics should be

something that every individual has the

capacity to do we want people to participate in the process we want them

to argue right about politics and we

want everybody to have a say everybody

to be able to run for office and at the same time we want to have protections

for each individual to do their own

thinking on political matters and so

forth so we have constitutional perfections on freedom of

speech so again it's not accidental that

we have a number of liberal revolutions

in the classically liberal sense first in England than in the United States

right then in France

all right so freedom increases right

wealth increases material goods and so

forth and again the dates are

significant because all of these dates are in the latter part of the 1700s a

century and a half transition that's the

Enlightenment I have an asterisk up here

you'll find this in the book I don't

know if you know when the last which

this is just a fun little fact here the

last which right was burned to death

right in in in England it was in the

1760s right actually her last name was a

witch and her daughter who was also apparently a witch

and their last name was Hicks okay so I

don't know if there's any family

connection right but that stands out in

some people's minds right has a

significant but the point is we stop

doing that anymore right

we stopped torturing people right over right religious differences we take

democracy seriously we take

republicanism seriously right we take

all of these institutions seriously

right liberalism in some form markets

right engineering medicine and because

we believe in the fruits and the

Enlightenment was the first era right in

human history that put together this whole package and obviously there are

hundreds right if not thousands of very

important intellectuals right making all

kinds of arguments in prevailing right

in the arguments until you have

significant movements but they do become

cultural movements and then they start to be institutionalized and become

started working in machinery right or

the working cultural fabric right of the societies that start to think this way

first England some extent a little bit

later in Scotland spreading across the

channel to France and many of the

Western European states petering out the

further east it goes right in Europe but

certainly then transplanted across the

ocean to the United States and then

everywhere that the British Empire went right the Enlightenment became

an intellectual and cultural phenomenon

right of this era now also a striking

thing we have the language here right so

we have Jefferson's language The Pursuit

of Happyness right but think about how

again if you know something about the

how rarer it has been the idea that life should be about happiness this should be

a fundamental birthright and that we

expect that if we give people space now

we have the right kind of society that

most people will be able to put together

happy fulfilling lives

again this is a historically

unprecedented phenomena we kind of take

it for granted right this idea of sort of just in economic terms right that you

know we expect our lives will be better

than our parents and our parents lives were economically better than the

grandparents that our kids should have it better off and so forth that progress

right again is historically

unprecedented until you get to the

middle part of the 1700s if you ask

people sort of speaking how does his

human history go are we getting better and better of

course the answer is were basically three know things used to be good in the

old days it's just getting worse and

worse and worse and worse and worse right the decline theory of history

right or it is sometimes things go up

sometimes things go down sometimes

things go up sometimes things go down

it's the same damn thing over and over

just one damn thing over and over right

so there's no improvement there's no

decline it's just right cyclical right so to speak or the randomness theory of

history right you look at history it's

too complicated and it doesn't make any

sense because the world is ultimately a

mystery and so we can't say this never

happened before the 1700s the idea that

we have finally figured out what has

kept people in ignorance and bondage for

so long we have become enlightened we've

got the tools if the reason we have a

scientific method we have the understanding of basic human liberties

and rights and respect for the individual and we have

enough people institutionally right who

believe this we can make a society that

in principle can solve any problem give

us enough time extraordinary optimism right progress as

a human birthright to be expected all

that's the Enlightenment vision I'm

calling it a vision at this point because I'm stopping the story here in

the late 1700s and at this point it was

largely an intellectual movement

although there were some significant

political revolutions economic revolutions and so forth and scientific

revolutions that had happened but this

was still largely a projection that if

we go further into the future we will

deliver the goods on all of these claims

that we are making here

so when the postmoderns now two

centuries later we go from the late

1700s to the late 1800s to the late

1900s are saying right that all of this

has failed and that we are now in a

position toward the end of the twentieth

century to look back and what the Enlightenment promises were what the

philosophical underpinnings of it were

that we can see that those philosophical

underpinnings have failed and that when

we tried to put them into practice right they necessarily as a failed philosophy

led to negative DIMM ruins

manifestations that's going to be the claim all right but I want to give a

definition here and part of what makes

talking about part of modernism

difficult any broad movement is

constituted by a large number of claims

I'm a philosopher by training so I always go for the philosophical labels

right but what we have here in modernism if we ask the metaphysical question what

is the nature of reality what's real and

what's not real how do we tell the difference between truth and fantasy

right what's just made up right

imaginary worlds or fictional worlds

from real actual reality and a basic

answer that the moderns give is a

realist answer or a naturalist answer

the world is basically and fundamentally

the natural world there might also be a

god and we're open to arguing for it

many of the moderns did believe in God

but they had a rational understanding of

God and believed that you had to argue for the existence of God and you had to

argue for it first on the basis of a

very good understanding of the way the

natural world worked so we're gonna start with the natural world and see

where that takes us he pissed omo logically how do we know how do we

really know because we're a smart

species and we have all kinds of beliefs

and things that we want to be true how do we sort out the ones that we really

should put our confidence in the answer

here is some sort of Objectivism right

we need to use our experience and reason

on the basis of that experience and of

course that's what scientists do in very sophisticated fashion but all of us in

our lives need to practice these trades

be as objective as we a can in our

experience assessing the data including

the negative data and trying to come up

with our best understanding of it what

is it to be a human being de-emphasize these ones but the

individualistic themes come out here and

our understanding of human nature and

the ethics of human beings or individuals they should be autonomous

they have the capacity to think for

themselves if they so choose to do so

some debate over another moral status

but largely a retreat from the idea of

original sin an idea that human beings

are born either neutral or some capacities for developing themselves to

the good a more understand optimistic

understanding of human beings and then

when we turn to political and economic issues some sort of broadly speaking

liberal capitalism comes to be the

dominant right set of views when and

where those are just the historical

right labels right of the Enlightenment

so this is a five-dimensional definition

of modernism and if you want to

understand right philosophy philosophy

is traditionally divided into five disciplines sometimes six alright what's

the nature of reality how do we know

what is it to be a human being what should I do with my life and how should

we live together metaphysics

epistemology human nature ethics and

politics right you have an integrated

view on all of those things that's your

philosophy of life this is the modernist

right view of life that is radical

because if you contrast that to the

Primo view our the pre-modern view emphasized

supernaturals and there's a realm that

is superior to or beyond the natural world and if you want to understand

reality that's where you start in some

sense the natural world is derivative right of a supernatural world that

ultimately true knowledge comes from

mystical insights that are directed to

special prophets right by God and or

faith we found a strong emphasis on the

sinful nature of man that human beings

are not autonomous but rather subjects

right and fundamentally we should be

obedient right both to our religious

authorities and to their religious

authorities who carry the carry the weight of God on earth various networks

of feudal obligation I'm a member of

this class and so Who I am and what is

owed to me and what I owe to other

people is defined by my class membership

and I have obligations of service and

sacrifice with respect to other groups

and the point just is that between the

pre moderns and the moderns that's the recognizable right set of debates right

on all of these right philosophical

dimensions and the postmoderns are going

to say they're both wrong right this

philosophy has failed we tried that for a thousand years we've

tried this one for 200 years it also has

failed we need a third alternative what is that going to be all right now let's

go back to Foucault I first point I want

to make is that post modernists although

I disagree with them all of them are

brilliant all of them are deep all of

them are extraordinarily well-read

particularly in the first generation

post modernists the ones that I think

are justifiably the names on everyone's

lips when we need to talk about

post-modernism and the reason for that

is that they go for the fundamentals

they really are drilling down to the

deepest strata so what is the deepest strata

well according to this light or this

chart rather the most fundamental thing

is this modernist belief in the

importance and the efficacy of human

reason that that's how we acquire

knowledge if we really want to sort out

the true from the false we have to be

sophisticated in the use of our rational

capacity logic mathematics scientific

method and so on so Foucault it is

meaningless right to speak in the name

of right or against reason truth or knowledge now that's a big guns claim

the entire enlightenment project relies

on a claim about reason and the claim is

going to be that that claim is not only false but just meaningless reason is a

meaningless concept proof right is a

meaningless concept knowledge is a

meaningless concept and one of the

things that anecdotally we know when we

start reading right postmodern things is

there's a strong dose of skepticism and cynicism about any sort of positive

value claim one way this is done

graphically right is certain kind of

success words epistemologically right

truth right or fact right they're always

put in scare quotes right and that's a

way of distancing yourself from it you know I'm going to use this word truth

right and then haha right that's the

implicit and this is where it's coming

from so what we do have in post-modernism is

a very deep skepticism about the human

capacity for knowledge and this is in

contrast right to the claim that says if

we have faith we're gonna get knowledge

or if we use reason we can get knowledge

both of those are going to be seen as

false there is no such thing as

knowledge we've been trying for a long time we can't figure it out

therefore we should realize the game is

up now the point then is going to be right I'm harping on this right

meaningless is a very strong claim right

poison from mr. right that's just a

meaningless phrase and the claim is when

I say knowledge that's no different from

poison man from mister actually I can't

even say it twice cuz I just made it up on this flat right

I just a meaningless nonsense phrase and

of course that's just a breakdown of communication and if we want to

communicate with each other we shouldn't be using meaningless words and phrases

and so the implication is going to be whatever

we're doing we're not talking about

knowledge we're not talking about truth

and we should just kind of set those

concepts aside and do something else now

what does that mean because that's out

there well richard rorty why not to do

death by PowerPoint but this is another

important right quotation here the

difficulty faced by a philosopher who

like myself is sympathetic to this

suggestion that is to say what Farouk oh

just said the truth knowledge etc are meaningless as one who thinks of himself

as auxiliary to the poet right rather

than to the physicist pause there when

we were talking about the Enlightenment

or saying reason scientific method right

science and so forth that the job of the

philosophers was to support and articulate to a large extent the whole

scientific project that has transformed

the world in the modern era and what

Rory is suggesting here is that no we

shouldn't be thinking of that right because what the scientists think

they're doing I think they're studying the natural world and they're gathering

facts right and they're doing logical

interpretations and they're getting closer and closer to the truth right of

things and we're really getting knowledge right of the way the world

works but if Foucault is right that's not what we're doing so shouldn't be

thinking of philosophers as working with

physicists and so he says yeah instead

I'm going to think of myself as an

auxilary to the poet as a philosopher

whatever that is I'm working with the

poets and the poets and what the poet's are doing is closer to I can't quite use

the word right right or true or is that

we be paradoxical but that's where we

need to be okay now what's the

difference between a physicist and a

poet or if you put it in philosophical

terms right the scientists say we are

trying to be objective I might really

want something to be true I might be

emotionally invested in a theory but if

the facts and the logic and the evidence

goes against my theory I'm gonna have to set aside my feelings and what I want to

be true I'm committed to objectivity but if

you're a poet right what is your mode of operation well you just make whatever you feel up right put it crudely right

you can make [ __ ] up that's fine because

when you are doing poetry you're expressing not necessarily a rational

theoretical understanding of the world

but your subjective reaction to your

circumstances right and the world and

you're putting it out there and when I

put my poem out there your response to

it is not is this true and does this

meet the canons of scientific method but

rather your reaction is you know does

this push my emotional buttons in the

right way and make me think and imagine

things that I want to think and imagine

and so what Rory is suggesting is if we

then set aside as we thinks we must the

Enlightenment project that means we are

setting aside objectivity that physics

project and instead we are enshrining subjectivity and the poet's are the most

human realization of human subjectivity

now that's kind of paradoxical because

it sounds like we're saying the right

way to think about the human condition is this way but how can I talk about the

right way without using the words truth right I can't say that I know this right

and that's what he goes on to say and

this is the predicament right that we

are in I have to do this without avoiding our hinting rather that my

suggestion somehow gets things right

that my philosophy corresponds to the

way things really are because as a

skeptic I can't know right what things

really are all right so we're going in

this way and we're using language to

suggest some new territory but we're aware of these pitfalls okay Stanley

fish Duke University professor for a

long time Milton scholar then actually

moved to my state became the highest

paid public employee in the state of Illinois made more than the governor as

a superstar professor at one of the

University of Illinois right campuses

talking here about deconstruction

plying postmodern methods to literary

constrict a criticism and the label

therefore a deconstruction is a literary

method of applying postmodern techniques

to techniques and the claim is to say

you know these deconstruction is really pretty great because it relieves me of

the obligation to be right I don't have

to worry about being right right what

does this text really mean and am i

interpreting it right correctly and should I have arguments and good

evidence right and so forth instead of

that objective right criterion

deconstruction says says I just have to be interesting and what's interesting

well that's deuces wild that's

subjective right all right and so you

start to come up with creative right

interpretations of the text and there

are not these constraints so literature

studies are going to go in a certain direction

Franklin trachea was a colleague of

fishes while there was at Duke Duke his

university is very important right to this postmodern story and there's a fork

in the road here because for some post

modernists it's just a matter of being

playful and interesting and coming up

with cool interpretations that push your

value buttons the fish option but we also know that post-modernism has an

agenda right there is a politics right

at work and this is what lent rikiya is

going to argue here which says

post-modernism this is now old news

seeks not to find the foundation and the conditions of truth all right so we're

not interested in about the conditions

of truth right that's what Foucault told

us we don't do anymore Rorty right agrees well if we're not

about truth and what are we about we are

about exercising power for the purpose of social change truth is out power is

in and then he immediately applies this

to the education because he's a professor he has students right coming

in on a regular basis what should I be

doing right as a professor well the

entire ideal of liberal arts education

right is based on the Enlightenment

vision every human being

these young people who come into my

classes of the capacity for reasoning

and I have to expose them to the facts

lots of different experiences and have

lots of debates and discussions right

among the students and with me about the difference ways we might interpret rich

all of these facts and data and we're

gonna put our interpretations up against

the really smart people who've written the books that everybody write the other

smart people think that we should read

and the idea is we are training the

individual human beings capacity for

thinking for digesting their experience

for being open to new experience to

debate changing their mind on all of the

rhetoric and argument and so forth

that's what your job is as a professor

because that's what you think is the

best way students can become truth

seekers themselves and really come up

with the kind of knowledge that they can

rely on in their lives but if all of

that is out what's left is power my job

as a professor as he goes on to say is

to quote help students spot confront and

work against the political horrors of

one's time so John Gray is right we do

live in the dim ruins of the enlightened

world it's all crap right out there my

job as a professor is to Train activists

and I use my power to do that recasting

right of Education on postmodern Minds

Andrea Dworkin right generic we know

that post-modernism comes in sub-brands

right there are racial versions there

are feminist versions there are environmentalist versions there are

ethnic versions or religiously based versions right and so forth the

Enlightenment said right every

individual matters all human beings

should right be free to explore their

their own lives intellectually politically economically and people

should have certain rights and so forth and so we strive for the extension of

those liberties to all human beings

everybody should ultimately be equal and

then we'll be right peaceful and

progressive Dworkin right and her

postmodern phase right in a book called

intercourse you don't want to read it really despite the sexy title how can you see

the words at the back because I'm kind

of a delicate person okay I'll just say

it right the normal [ __ ] by a normal man

is taken to be an act of invasion and

ownership undertaken in a mode of

predation so let's talk about equal

liberty and rights and human dignity rich and extending the franchise and

education opportunities that's all a fraud

and the reality is men have their power

agenda women of course have their own

power agenda but there's unequal power

and that's the bottom line and that

carries into the bedroom and to me the

most important word here from the

Dworkin possession is the word normal

right so it's not just that rapists are

a minority of weirdos right among us

right whom we need to deal with this is

what she takes to be the human condition

in male-female relations so that

enlightenment promise is again a fraud

we can extend this to international

relations right we're not exporting

democracy and markets and peace and

prosperity for all when we are taking

the Enlightenment vision and spreading

it around the world and encouraging people to trade with us instead we have

a darker vision again strong nations

versus weak nations and we all have this

rhetoric about trying to get along with

each other but really it's the matter of

the strong nations like the United States imposing their agenda in various

sneaky forms on all of the weaker

nations in the world and so really the

weaker nations of the world are always

right the victims now this is a

reflection by Leo Tarr Jean Francois Leo Tharp about the first Gulf War in the

1990's about Saddam Hussein so what do

you think about Saddam Hussein probably

you've heard from this postmodern

perspective the CIA propaganda version

right that he was a brutal dictator

right who did bad things to his people right etcetera etcetera the truth is I'm

sorry I can't say truth but something or

right that's settin Hussein is a product

of Western departments of state and big

companies the powerful corporations and

the powerful nations just as Hitler

Mussolini and Franco were born of the

peace imposed on their countries by the

victors Hitler was a victim Mussolini

was a victim Franco a victim they were

bad guys that's fine but they weren't

like homegrown making their own problems

and becoming evil they are a symptom of

the real badness which is in the Western

rich capitalist nations that have this

rhetoric right about so forth the Iraqi

dictatorship proceeds as do the others from the transfer of aporia's right

that's a greek word or an academic you

have to throw a few of those in which

means problems in the capitalist system

to the vanquished less developed or

simply less resistant countries so what

we have here is the Marxist Leninist

theory of the exportation imperialistic

Lee of problems from the rich countries

to than the the poorer countries and

that was a hint

but Derrida right makes its yeah

explicit quotation deconstruction he's

the big name in literary deconstruction

but here he says why is he a

deconstructionist and of course there

are philosophical issues but he says

deconstruction never had any meaning or interest at least in my eyes and as a

radicalization that is to say within the

certain sorry the tradition of a certain

Marxism in the spirit right of Marxism

so Marx is important here not so literal

Marx but some sort of Marxism right

spirit sort of thing and so the various

kinds of neo Marxism are going to be an

important part of the story here now the

point of all of these selection of quotes is to set up right for then the

same chart but now we fill it in the way

that postmoderns will do right

metaphysics what is real what is the

nature of reality the postmodern answer is going to be that that's a pointless

question that's a meaningless question

and in philosophy we just that position anti-realism so we're not

going to try to debate whether God

really is real the way religious

philosophy wants to do or whether

natural world is the only reality the

way the more scientific minded both of them are making claims that they can

figure out the way reality really is the

postmoderns are skeptical and to say

we're just going to dispense with

metaphysics as a discipline or anti-realist in point how do we know

well the answer is going to be that we

are subjectivist s-- right but rather

that we are socially right subjective

and that ties in to a kind of social

determinism language matters a lot and

the argument that often is the most

prominent one is that we're born into

certain linguistic groups we learn a

certain language at our mothers and our

fathers knee but built into those languages a certain set of assumptions

and ways of framing the world and those

get deeply baked into our understanding

of the world we can't think outside of

them and so we are all prisoners of our linguistic groups and the various social

things that come out of that the groups

of course different languages different

ways of thinking about each other and we

can't think past it mean that those groups are going to be in conflict with

each other there's not going to be an irrational way a logical way discourse

way of getting past our different

understandings of the way the world works so we're going to have group

conflict and need to make good on this a

little bit later in the talk here but there's going to be a strong theme of

egalitarianism right equality of some

sort is going to be the trumping value

right and it's but it's going to be a

group equality that is the trumping

value and some kind of socialism and

again those are fighting words but I will make good on them and that's where

we are now and if you put all of the

charts together that is a set of

different answers to either the pre-modern or the modern chart so we

have pre-modern modern and postmodern five philosophical

issues completely different packaging's

for each of them okay now here's my main

bad guy right in my account all right

and this is when I take a lot of heat

from right because there are any number

of scholars and there's an argument that

you can make here that says that Immanuel Kant is an Enlightenment

thinker and I think there is some truth

to that if you say here's 20 things that make you an Enlightenment thinker I

think kicks off about six of the boxes

right and that's a legitimate thing to say but in my judgment Conte is the

first of the counter Enlightenment

thinkers and he was doing his main

writing in the 1780s critique of Pure

Reason is his most famous work and the

most important work in my view published

first edition in 1781 and I will just

give you a quick thumbnail of why I see

him as the beginning of the turn from an

Enlightenment to a counter enlightenment

and why Conte is also going to be

important and this is not a controversial claim in the history of

philosophy though is that can't

basically conquered the German

intellectual world by the time we get to 1800 and much of the story of German

philosophy since then is the story of

neo-kantian ISM and reactions to Conte

Conte as much as I will disagree with them now

you have to say he is the most important

philosopher of the last 200 and maybe 20

years or so now just to Telegraph write a few things there in the preface one of

the things the book is called the critique of Pure Reason all right so

it's a critique of Reason right and a

critique of pure right reason so there's

some technical terminology built into

there but Kant in his preface says that

his agenda is to say that enlightenment

philosophers are making all of these very grand if not grandiose claims for

the power of reason and my job is to put

limits to it say there's only certain

things that you can reason your way up

to beyond that there are limits and

those limits are quite severe right in

the Contin corporis all right so what we

have then is a philosopher who is

shifting away from how can reason and

solve all of our problems to saying no here are some limits to reason and part

of his motivation is to say that he like

many of the religious thinkers right of

the era or veer worried about this trend line right

science is coming along and it's

increasingly naturalistic and the

scientists are coming up with all these

explanations for things that really are

in conflict with a lot of traditional religion and so do I go with my

scientific mind or do I go with my

religious heart and that's a big huge

right gut wrenching dilemma right for so many people right at the time and it

seems like the choice is if you follow

the trend line right Sciences increasing religion is declining that if we go

along then religion is just going to be

out of human affairs so we need to put

limits to what reason can do as Khan

puts it to make room for faith right if

we say reason is limited here then

beyond that faith will have a safety

zone and we will continue to be able to

articulate faith and if you emphasize that point that is not an enlightenment

point but it is central to Kant's

argument canta labels himself a Copernican

revolution nary philosopher right he

says his philosophy amounts to a

Copernican revolution Copernicus was the

first in the modern world to suggest

that the Sun was at the center of the

system and not the earth so we now have

a solar system right instead of a geocentric system and if you think of

the cosmos as the earth at the center

we're at the center of God's plan for

the world and everything revolves around

us well that's got some pregnant

metaphysical implications and value

implications if you think by contrast

that we are just kind of a putzie plan at 93 million miles away from the center

of the action the Sun is at the center

and we're just whizzing around and

largely a empty space that also has some kind of cosmological metaphysical

implications so that shift from

geocentric to solar centric right

absolutely important and what Conte is

saying is that's exactly what he's doing philosophically philosophy up to his

point had assumed Haizi said that we are concerned with

objective reality that there's a reality

out there and at our job as philosophers is to get it right that reality is what

it is it sets the terms and it's our job

to have our minds map right or somehow

represent or somehow thira ties the way things

really objectively are out in the world

Khan's argument is that that is

impossible that we realize here speaking

collectively for philosophers right at

that point I have been trying for

millennia to do that I can't is

convinced by the skeptical arguments to say that that is impossible there is no

way for us to be objective about what is

out there and so what we need to do is a

Copernican shift and recast everything on subjective terms so it's a deep

transition from a commitment to

objectivity to subjectivity when you do

that you're in a different philosophical

territory and what's going to then

happen over the course of the next

centuries is the implications of that get played out increasingly over the

generations now one thing I would mention here I don't know if you've read

all the way through the critique of Pure

Reason it's a big book Kahn is not a

noted for his stylism but there is a

very important section at the end or

toward the end of the critique of Pure

Reason called the antinomies of reason

that Kant uses as kind of a capstone set

of arguments about why he thinks we have

to abandon the idea that we can know

reality that we can be objective in any fundamental way and they're called the

antenna mieze of reason and what he does

is say if you take four big issues in

the history of philosophy of course one

of them is there really a god or not and

Kant says absolutely you can prove

beyond a shadow of a doubt that there is

a God and that he must exist but you can

also absolutely beyond the shadow of a

doubt come up with a completely

convincing argument that proves that there are no gods is the soul immortal

well you can prove that the soul is

immortal or you can also prove that the soul isn't do we have free will or is

everything determined you prove both of them did the universe have a beginning

in space and time well yes and no and as

far as logic and reason right and the validity of arguments gokon has

convinced that arguments on both of these sides are completely legitimate

and the conclusion that he draws from

that then is to say if this tool of reason can contradictory conclusions on the same

issue that shows that reason is out of

its depth when it's trying to grapple

with these deep metaphysical issues so

we just have to stop being metaphysical

about those issues all right now that's

my five minute summary for why Conte is important okay and I take a lot of heat

on this right justifiably so because there are good arguments to be made that

Conte is pro reason right in various some respects but this is an important

turning point according to my argument

now what I want to do is just point out

some dates here come on died in 1804 all

right so what's that two hundred and

fourteen years ago now all right so I

want to jump just kind of a long

generation just to give you a whiff of

what has happened in the history of philosophy after Conte because Conte everybody has to know

react to constant scottsville Asif you

let's jump to 1843 Kierkegaard right if

you're interested in existentialism and

certain forms of Protestant theology Kierkegaard you have to grapple with him

another giant right in the pantheon forty years later but what we have is an

explicit irrationalism by the time we

get to Kierkegaard changer if you want

to believe the things that are genuinely

meaningful in your life and are going to

give you significance you have to make a leap as he puts it here into the

observed because the things that really

give us meaning in life right we can't

make sense of them rationally but we

really want to believe them and feel

that we need to so we need to do a leap

of faith unfortunately we've got all of

these Pro reasoned philosophers who say

we have to be rational right and so forth and so what we need to do then is

crucify reason go on the attack against

reason so we're very deeply

anti-enlightenment right in this school

40 years later all right that's 1840s

another 40 years it's not perfect math

what's that 43 years Nietzsche right

astoundingly important philosopher for

the last hundred years writing how pitiful how shadowy and fleeting how

aimless and capricious the human

intellect is so anti rationalism right

with a vengeance right

80 years later jumping another forty years Martin Heidegger whether you love

him or hate him right the man was a

screaming Nazi after all right so I'm

gonna be a little bit prejudiced but

brilliant brilliant philosopher right uh

no I disagree again fundamentally with

him he's on my top three list of most

important philosophers of the 20th century most philosophers right will

agree with this and again he's talking

about here we're trying to do some metaphysics and reason our way to

certain conclusions and we just keep reaching these contradictions and here's

this contradiction that has nagged

philosophers for a huge amount of time

and heidegger's reaction to that then is

to say if this contradiction breaks the sovereign tree of Reason then the fate

of the rule of logic is also decided

logic disintegrates in the vortex of a

more original questioning

so some issues that we want to grapple

with right somehow logic gets in the way

reason can't wrap its mind around it so we need to set aside logic set aside

reason and find some other way to get to

that and the point just is that there's

now a long irrationalist traditional

philosophy very powerful and very

prominent right after Conte and by now

we are getting into the 20th century all

those are all what we call continental

philosophers these guys are also continental but they are of a different

school that is typically seen as a pro

reason pro science school and things

have been going on in post enlightenment

philosophy also in the 1800s and as we

got into the twentieth century but many

of the pro science philosophers are also

reaching skeptical dead-end kinds of

conclusions so I'll just give you some

names here Moritz Schlick leading

logical positivist thinker reaching

conclusions about language right

language is not a tool that we use

objectively to try to come to understand

the world the rules of language are in

principle arbitrary right so language is an arbitrary subjective vehicle that we

use logic the scientists are all about

logic right and logical proof right in

and building mathematics on on logical foundations right and so forth logic

according to Ludwig fitness on all the

propositions of logic say the same thing

that is nothing logic does not tell us

anything a gar principles of logic and

mathematics are true universally okay

that sounds very nice right if we're

interested in science and coming to understand the world we want universal

truth but why are the principles of logic and mathematics true Universal

well because we never allow them to be

it's a decisional thing we just allow

them to be true it's not that they are

true and we have discovered them it's a

subjectivism that has been reached at this point here at the point then is

logic language mathematics either empty

or subjective and these are the deep

truths that leading philosophers are

reaching again now by the first decades

of the 20th century some more right

rudolf carnap metaphysics and value

theory so metaphysics and ethics two of

the big concerns what's the nature of reality what is it to live a good life

to traditional philosophy concerns

well metaphysics including all value and

normative theory logical analysis yields the negative result that the alleged

statements in this domain are entirely

meaningless metaphysics is entirely

meaningless ethics entirely meaningless and if it's meaningless and this point

was to try to do those things we should just set them aside

Brian Medlin now pretty generally

accepted and I think this is as a survey truth true by professional philosophers

that ultimate ethical principles must be

that's 1957 published in one of the

leading respected journals write a

philosophy and I want to cite the 1950s

because this is important right as a

decade now by the time we get to the

1950s just the lean philosophers are the

ones that you would read if you take

history of philosophy courses you become

a serious philosopher or you're

a philosophically minded person who

wants to know what's going on all of them are reaching skeptical empty

nihilistic conclusions about the nature

of philosophy so Leo Tarr Foucault Derrida Rorty the biographical data

becomes important brilliant guys they go

to school born in 1924 26 30 31 by time

they get into their 20s and early 30s

which was by the time most people get

their doctorates if they're going to get a doctorate the itard gets his in 58

Foucault a little earlier in 51 Derrida

and 55 Rory and 56 they're being

educated and reaching professional

status in philosophy in the 1950s what

had they learned from all of the genius

philosophers that they had read

skepticism empty emptiness meaningless

and so forth and the point is going to

be that the reason why these guys are

cited justifiably as the leading post

modernists is that they are the ones who

best recognized where philosophy was in

the 1950s and the 1960s and decided what

to do about it what the next steps were

going to be they were the ones who

reacted to the failure of philosophy in

the middle part of the 20th century and

came up with the alternative and what's

the alternative so this is my first

thesis I'm going to say and we've talked a lot about knowledge right truth

meaningless right and so forth this claim here is that contain epistemology

is the ground root but as things get

worked out over the course of the next

century and a half by the time we get to the middle part of the 20th century

postmodern philosophical foundations

have been laid and and it's got this

interesting quote from Nietzsche right

who's kind of on the same page here if

you take Conte seriously and apply it consistently you will end up with a

knowing crumbling

scepticism now he was projecting and

that's exactly where philosophy got

fifty years after his death okay and

that's the thesis that I am arguing so

when you are encountering post

modernists and in one side of their

mouth they're saying nobody knows anything right for sure right it's all

just semantics right there are different

interpretive frameworks you have your narrative I have my narrative they have

their narratives and so forth and it's

all just narratives well narratives are just subjective constructions that push various value

buttons right that we have and we have

no objective way to adjudicate the value

or increasing betterness of one compared to the other that's this and there's a

deep philosophical story for why that

came to ascendancy in the Western

intellectual world when it did all right

I think that's a good argument

partly because I made it up myself and I

know there's a lot of good counter

arguments right they can be made about

that and we were just flying over the

territory at 40,000 feet so to speak but

there's a thesis there but I do think

this argument I've made so far has a problem any guesses that's it's false

it's not complete the problem is going

I haven't said much about politics but

we also know when we talk with

post-modernism that there is a politics

at work there as well all right so that has to be integrated into the story

right as well so the angry young man

right this is not just you know your

theory of concept formation and

linguistic semantics needs some adjustment Hicks right it's something

more significant right going on and we

know that politics gets people juiced up

so we have to talk about politics a little bit here now suppose though that

we believed sorry this thesis was true

right now really what post-modernism is

about is some really deep people

thinking about naw in truth and the epistemology and

metaphysics and reaching some really

skeptical conclusions yeah I guess

nobody really does know anything maybe

it is all just subjective right maybe we all just do make up things that push our

own value buttons and and so forth or

we're just culturally determined by the

group so maybe that's true so maybe I'll just be a skeptic okay about everything

and that then means that I and everybody

else when we believe things we're really

just making arbitrary subjective

commitments to this that or the other

thing whatever we want right because that's what subjectivism is all about bottom line right so that's true what

would that mean for politics alright so

there's what maybe 150 a couple hundred

people here right so suppose we all did

a lot of philosophy and all of us came

to be screaming subjectivist s-- right

that's a bit flip really strongly

believing that there is no truth that

everything is just subjective right whatever and so forth I said all of us

then are making our decisions about what

we're going to believe in the value

parts of our lives we're going to include that some political views right

so we're all gonna make arbitrary subjective commitments to a certain way

of thinking about the world politically

and so we all do that and then we do the

survey so we just go around the room and

say okay what what what politics did you

subjectively commit to right and he says

well I don't know he's big strapping guys I want to be the king I'm into

monarchy and I think you're looking

around I have a pretty good chance that I could pull it off okay

form a few strategic alliances right and so forth I don't know you don't seem

like a very sweet right person you say I

don't know I think everybody should be

nice and get along and share everything

right with everybody so she doesn't like

monarchy but she's gonna write to commit

right and you somebody says I don't know I think people should have freedom and

rights are absolute right and other

people are going to be fascists and

right I think I like the idea of I don't

know let's all go back to the land and

right peacefully in harmony with nature so some kind of tribalism right and so

on okay so we're all just doing our subjective fantasizing how many

different politics will we come up with

right in this room all right

I don't know right there's a hundred and sixty people then maybe 165 right

because five people I are indecisive and

changed their mind right and so forth

you're that's fine you know because everything is subjective anyway right

okay good so what we would expect then

this is the more serious hypothesis is

if everything was just about people reaching skeptical relativistic

conclusions about knowledge and truth

that when they turn to value issues and political issues they would be all over

the map politically you would have

people making subjective leaps into all kinds of normative programs and

political programs but and this is the

problem when you look at the post

modernists they are not all over the map

politically if you however you define the political spectrum far whatever

right over here too far whatever right

over here right if everything was subjective and random then we would

expect a random distribution on the

spectrum but what we find is that all of

the post modernists in the first two generations without exception I don't

take it on faith for me but I can give

you the list and you can do your own homework you take the top ten leading

post modernists and they are all here on the political spectrum you take the top

20 the top 50 the top hundreds of top

200 most cited people in the literature

they are all at the very far left end of

the political spectrum and that's not an

accident that's not a random

distribution so that's the problem why is it then that we find a very powerful

contingent of thinkers who subscribe to

far left politics now adopting

postmodern sceptical relativistic

subjective istic epistemology what's going on there

alright go back to biography there's the

big form using them as representative

if you add his politics by the time he's

in the 50s right he's a young man and

like most young people we get into

politics that we get passionate right about our politics he committed to

far-left version of neo-marxists

Fuko joined the French Communist Party

was with them for a few years

broke with them but then in the 60s

became a kind of Maoist another kind of

communism jacques derrida politics did

not join the French Communist Party

almost but he did hang around in those

circles publishing those journals and as

we saw in the quotation earlier said his

entire agenda was in a certain spirit of

Marxism Richard Rorty

is an American these three are French

Communist Party never that strong right

in the United States right for various

reasons but the American political

landscape Rorty is a strong social democrat and

about as far left as you can go on the

American political landscape and the

same thing holds for Stanley fish and

the others as you go through the list all on the very far left part of the

spectrum so what we then have is a

number of individuals very smart

committed to far left politics but in

the 1950s in a very skeptical

philosophical world now the politics

matters in another way because all right

there's Uncle Carl I swear you this my

introductory microeconomics professor

looked exactly like that guy

but it was really disconcerting because

I was reading a lot of markzware at the time this guy was actually kind of

conservative right and so it was a

little cognitive dissonance here so what

does far left especially Marxist

philosophy mean of course lots of things

to be said so I'm just gonna give you a

thumbnail thing here but here's a few

things for claims of classical socialism

Marxist version two of them are going to

be moral claims if you compare

capitalism to socialism which one is

morally superior and which one is

morally inferior there's the moral

agenda and Marx as we know right thought

economics was the mother science the

foundation right of everything that is

built upon it foundational economic

claims about the economic productivity of capitalism compared to socialism and

this has worked out by Marx and his

colleague angles primarily and others in

the middle part of the eighteen

hundred's communist manifesto was published in 1848 hold that date in your

mind so first the moral claims capitalism is

exploitative you have rich people you

have poor people the rich people have

the power they use their power to keep the poor people down and to extract

right wealth from them it's competitive

its imperialistic and so the capitalist

profit motive brings out the worst in

people and it's a dog-eat-dog struggle right and so forth socialism then is

moral because it rejects the impetus of

capitalism the competition the class

Society basis instead it's committed to

humanity it's committed to peace everybody is going to share and we're

going to try to keep people equal

alright so moral claim capitalism seems

to be doing all right and is more

productive than feudalism was right but

ultimately it's going to be less productive than socialism the Marxists

right are claiming because it's got

these internal contradictions that are

going to work it's their way out and as

a result of that it's not going to be able to keep its act together the poor

get poorer the rich get richer this

causes internal conflict right within

the cat advanced capitalist societies

and the whole thing then will collapse

in revolution socialist buy economies

by contrast they will be more prosperous

because people are going to be working

with each other instead of against each

other and at least in the early stages we're going to have a dictatorship of

the proletariat but the dictatorship

will be wise benevolent leaders who are able to assess the economy as a whole

and make proper allocations of resources

and distribute things right

appropriately and so we will be much more right productive so a pair of moral

claims and a pair of economic claims

classical Marxist socialism now the

other thing I want to add to this is that Marxism labels itself as scientific

socialism socialism but we're not just

abstract dreamers we are socialists who

think we have studied the way the world

works the iron laws of economics right are going to work out human nature we

have the right theory of it this theory

yields definite predictions about the

way the world is going to go and we are

going to stand on those predictions we are scientific about this this is not

utopia it's reality so another death by

PowerPoint chart let me talk you through

it

Marxism is a class analysis so let's

take the slogan there to get richer and

the poor get poorer we all know that one but we'll tease it out what does that

mean when we actually apply it to a

social scientific understanding of the

way capitalist society works well we say

we have three classes we have the working class the proletariat we have a

middle class because there had been a rising middle class and we have the

upper class the working class they're

weak they're poor right they don't have much status the middle class they're

comfortable but they're unstable and the

upper class are the powerful and the rich people okay so that's where they

are initially initially what's going on

then in capitalist societies of course

the poor are being exploited the wealth

is being extracted from there's so many of them wages or pushdown capitalists

get to make all the rules they control

the government so they can extract as

much wealth as they want and so these

guys are exploited and it's very hard for them to get out of their condition

if not right impossible and so they're

basically going to

as Marxism predicts become more and more

people in the population so the

prediction then is going to be as

capitalism advances more and more people

will be forced into poverty or as a

result of the capitalist dynamic the

middle class right they're unstable

because the logical capitalist competition right says there's winners

and there's losers and we're all competing with each other some people in

the middle class will succeed in clawing their way up to the rich class but the

most of them are going to at some point

make a mistake right or they're going to

be out competed and they'll be forced down into the proletariat so the claim

of classical Marxism is that the middle

class really has no future it's going to

be squeezed out right and that then predicts population should asymptotic ly approach zero right for the future and

the rich right start off there

exploiting and ruthless they've got all

the power but of course they're all

competing with each other right because if you're a millionaire you want to be a

hundred million heir then you want to be a billionaire and if your Marxist you

believe that's zero-sum competition and

so the logic then is to say fewer and

fewer rich people will succeed at this

ruthless competition and they will

slowly amass all of the wealth in their own hands and then all of the other

former Semler rich people will be forced

down right the chain of plan so we have

very then three social science

predictions that we make right population of the poverty people in

poverty sure will go up dramatically under capitalism the middle class will

shrink to nothingness and the rich class

the bourgeoisie will also shrink over to

a very small number

now the problem then is going to be I'm going to say this is a problem that even

in Marx's lifetime and certainly in the

succeeding generations right of Marx's

by the time we get to 1900 right 1920

right and so forth we march our way through is that all three of those

predictions failed it's not just that

they failed by a little bit right or

that the data was mixed but that all of

the data is showing that the exact

opposite is coming to pass if you look

at poverty rates under the more

capitalistic nations rather than more

people living in poverty poverty rates

are going down they're going down

significantly that's an opposite the middle class is

supposed to be becoming smaller and

smaller instead what is happening is it's getting bigger and significantly

bigger the number of people who are rich

is supposed to be getting smaller and

smaller but the problem is the number of

rich people is getting more and more

damnit there's just more and more

millionaires right and then billionaires

right and so forth now this is a problem

because if you think of Marxism as

social science social science stands on

its predictions as measured against the

data and by every measure Marxist social

science failed to fit the data in fact

the data was the exact opposite and this

caused a crisis not only you know by

people who are not sympathetic to

Marxism say hahaha you Marxist got it all wrong but a crisis within Marxism

and what you find when you read the

Marxist of each succeeding generation is they are aware of the data we predicted

this but now the data says that what do

we do and of course we need to start

tweaking the theory right in various

ways but this is a problem and as the

generations go on and the predictions get worse and worse right the problem

gets more and more I want to say that

the crisis reached a head again by the

time we get to the 1950s the reason for

that is important

partly because if you look at the first half of the 20th century

all right the Marxist head said world

war 1 right the marxist theory of world

war 1 is it's all the capitalist countries getting together and going to

war over resources and what's going to

happen is the capitalist countries will

basically kill each other off or weaken each other and that will provide a space

for the communist revolution of some sort right to fill the vacuum that

didn't happen but good news depression

right the Great Depression happened Marxist theory says right this is the

final death throes of capitalism soft

market excesses capitalist getting

greedy etc etc capitalism is over and

out of the economic collapse

or the proletariat will get their act

together and we will have revolution that didn't happen World War two well

this is one's a little bit more

complicated because we've got the communist nations fighting the fascist

Nations fighting the liberal democratic

nations but the theory was going to be that the fascists and the liberal

capitalists would weaken each other and

then Communists if they bited their time

and thought strategically by the time

right one killed the other the remaining

one would be weakened and we will be able to kill them and then communist

revolution of some sort

right once again by the time you get to

the 1950s though it's clear that's not going to happen as what's happening in

well fascism is gone but it's probably

coming back unfortunately right but it's

gone right and we do then have the

familiar Cold War contours right so the

Soviet Union versus the left dress or

the liberal democratic nations right in

the West but the liberal capitalist eminent nations have recovered from

World War one from the depression from

World War two and things are pretty good if you start looking at what's going on

the poor in the 1950s in the capitalist

countries right they're all buying cars

and television sets and the interstate

has been built so they're taking all these trips right and international

flight is increasingly available -

everybody's enjoying all of these movies right and eating better and people are

getting taller etc etc so by the time we

get to the 1950s if you were on the very

far left and sympathetic to Marxism it's

not looking good right in terms of the

data so I guess works we've had a hundred

years of waiting for the revolution

hasn't happened capitalists are doing

better and better it seems but what

about those moral claims capitalism is

inhumane well of course there's lots of

things we can complain about how

Canadians have treated each other and

how Americans have treated each other

human rights issues right and so forth

and the grand scheme of things those are

important but relatively light by

historical standards by and large you've

got a pretty good chance of putting

together a pretty good life if you're living in one of those countries but on the other side to

crushing blows happened in 1956 and

these were crushing blows to Western

Marxists especially because for a

generation Western Marxist had thought

despite the predictions about the

economic modelling right and so forth at least we have the Soviet Union and the

Soviet Union is a beacon of our humane

moral future it's a communist revolution

that succeeded and Stalin Papa Joe is at

the helm with the power to do what is

necessary to usher the Soviet Union and

therefore eventually the rest of the

world in the right direction an almost

messianic right fervor about what was

going on in the Soviet Union any number

of fellow travelers go over there they

take the tour's they come back right glowing right reports

1956 sahlan has died Khrushchev has consolidated power and he announces in a

speech that all of those stories about genocide about the asylums about the

torture about Siberia were true it

wasn't just CIA propaganda was alright

tens of millions of people tortured

starved exterminated under what was

supposed to be the humane a social

system that ever existed how is this

1956 also in Hungary one of the

satellite states right now behind the

Iron Curtain things aren't going very

well economically students in university

classes are chafing at having to take

only communist party propaganda right in

their courses right they want a more liberal curriculum they want to have

jobs when they get out workers are

hungry and so their approach

that are starting peaceful protests well

we know socialist governments care about

their people they care about the workers they care about the students the

reaction of the Hungarian government was

to call up Moscow say we got big

problems here Moscow sent in the troops sent in the

tanks and protesters are shot the

ringleaders are dragged off to prison

they are tortured forced to give up

their allies were then arrested tortured

and tanks are sent into the protesters and ride over people and Western

technology for the first time this is

shown on international television

everybody sees it it's not just CIA

propaganda again how is this possible

this is a crisis of faith in the 1950s

so the old left that is to say the Marxist left is in trouble what are we

going to do and what do you do if you

are a young person in your late 20s and

early 30s strongly committed to your

politics and you're really really smart

well Yuri strategize and so one of the

things that we do know that happened is this is exactly when the New Left

started so we have a new left a new

agenda right and so forth and the point

is going to be that that agenda right is

being set by the strategists and the strategists are the most philosophically

minded of them and we know who those

people are going to be so this is the

second thesis that is to say that by the

time you get to the 1950s what has

happened is yes philosophies at a very

skeptical place epistemologically but at

the same time people on the far left are

going through a crisis about what we are supposed to do now that our youthful

dreams in the classical Marxist ideal

have failed and even all kinds of neo

Marxism have been tried those have

failed the practical results in the

Soviet Union and other places has tried have failed we need to do some serious

thinking now I've used the word faith

and I want to say that there is exactly

a parallel here because if we think

about the kinds of uses of faith that

were more familiar with what happens if you're an intelligent young person and

you believe a certain religious worldview typically you come to believe

that it's true it explains a lot of things but it also has a strong

normative component you believe that it is moral and decent and it's the hope

for Humanity that your religious vision come to prevail more but then you start

to grow up and you start to realize that

there are lots of smart people who

believe very different things right about religion you start to have arguments with them sometimes they've

got really good arguments and you find

yourself questioning on the basis of the

evidence and the data whether your

religious views right or true and

sometimes you reach the conclusion that

you know I don't actually think the arguments for my religion are are that

good there's a lot of holes have been

poked in them they can't be true and

these various alternative religions

including non religions the arguments

for them are pretty compelling so we

have a crisis right a faith that of

course we know millions of people go

through and to put it in polarized terms

it's am I going to go with what seems to

be the best arguments the best logic the

best evidence to go with my reason or am

I going to go with what I really want to

be true which is to say this religious

view that has formed part of my identity

and my understanding of what is

beautifully and nobly possible for human beings what choice do I make and what is

that polarized you really have two

choices one choice is to say you know

the most important thing is the facts the truth and I have to go with the

logic I have to go with the evidence and

that means as hard as it might be for me

emotionally I have to abandon

the religion of my youth I have to live

without that religion I got some other

more rational religion or possibly live

without religion at all because objectivity and reasoning matter and

some people do without in that road but

the other option then is to say you know

I'm gonna believe what I want to believe

there's no way I can give up this

beautiful deep part of my identity and

that means that I have to find some way

to get rid of the logic the evidence and

the commitment to reason and I'm going

to elevate a subjective commitment to something I want to be true over reason

and we do know in the history than a

religion that there are many religious

strategists who take that route limit

reason crucify reasons set aside reason

in order to rejuvenate personal faith

commitments now that exact same

psychology carries over to politics and

that's the claim I'm making here about

the 1950s socialists the smart ones

recognized that the arguments for

socialism had been destroyed Mises Hayek

and the others and all of the empirical

data right that was out there

there's no way to give a rational

explanation for the economic superiority

of socialism right over capitalism and

the data shows that the socialist

nations have been brutal in practice

that by and large whatever our gripes

are about the West's things are pretty

good morally speaking but if you're a

committed socialist you're at a crisis

at this point because you believe that

capitalism is evil and socialism is

moral but the logic says the opposite do you

go with what you want to believe your

socialist ideal or do you go with the logic and we do know again some people

make the different choice some people

say okay I need to modify my socialism abandoned socialism

and move toward some sort of liberal

democratic understanding but a lot of

people double down and say I am going to

find a more sophisticated way to bracket

Reason bracket the evidence bracket the

idea that on politics reason evidence

and logic is fundamental and that's the

postmodern move right there another

colleague at Duke University Frederick

Jamerson Marxist theorist at exactly

this juncture says yes we are aware of

Marxism x' and neo Marxism history we

are aware of how things have gone right

in the West and we do know it is evidence versus political commitment and

he's making his point clear everything

in the last analysis is politics your

political commitments are fundamental

everything will be shaped to fit the

political commitments all right so the

Enlightenment right versus post-modernism right that's the battle

we're fighting right now these guys were

young in the 50s became mature in the

1960s leading their professions grand

old men in the 70s and 1980s trained any

number of PhD students who then sells

went on to be professors in the

humanities in the early the 90s early

2000s and our generation extraordinarily

successful for the power of their

political strategy and their ability to

marshal the philosophical and

epistemological arguments to support

them now that's where we are so the

battle is joined but I want to now turn

in my concluding minutes here and be

critical right of post-modernism there

are literally dozens of important

philosophical issues that I'm not going

to be able to talk about obviously all

of them need to be engaged are there

good arguments for skepticism and good

against right and so all of those issues

led philosophers down varying paths have to be engaged so I don't want to

undermine the importance of any of those

but there are some things that we can say about the postmodern project the

postmodern claims and about its

assessment of the Enlightenment

especially so one thing that we are

aware of right is this issue that post

modernists are as a movement right not logically consistent and there's a

certain amount of traction and importance to pointing out the logical

contradictions right that are made in

postmodern so on the one hand if we say

right that all truth is relative that is

an epistemological claim right that

comes out of post-modernism but at the

same time post modernists will tell you

that in some sense their way of looking at things is the right way of looking at

things the other narratives need to be

set aside bracketed so when we start

talking about what gets into the

curriculum for example the standard postmodern claim is not that there are

all these other traditions right and

they're all relative and therefore they're all equal and so we should teach

them all the agenda is no the postmodern

one is the right way and we're exerting all of our efforts to get rid of all

these other books that do not fit our

postmodern Canon that's a contradiction

and it's worth calling them on it if we

believe strongly relativistically that

all cultures are equally deserving of

respect because there is no objective

stance from which we can evaluate them

there is a big question why it is that

Western culture is always singled out as uniquely bad and evil and worthy of condemnation that's a contradiction and it's worth calling out that one if we

believe values are really subjective

then that sits very uneasily right with

the rhetoric that suggests racism really

is evil I think that's true that's a

truth claim sexism really is evil but

you can't have it both ways technology

is really bad and destructive

right but it's really unfair some people

have so much technology while others are

going without we hear both of those

right on a regular basis one implication

of deep subjectivism and relativism is a

kind of tolerance right if I don't know

the truth and you don't know the truth and all we have is our own subjective

narratives right and so forth well live

and let live you do your thing we should just be tolerant dominance is bad right

the whole exploitation thing rich versus weak that's just that's as wrong men

subjugating women right value judgments

but what we find of course is when post

modernists do assume positions of power

in the classroom in university

administration in other cultural

institutions very authoritarian forms of

political correctness are immediately

put into place not tolerance not issuing

the use of dominance and power another

contradiction worth calling racism

sexism and party race class gender if

those are the big three right in terms

of analysis but when we look at the arguments here the claim of course

theoretically is that liberal capitalist

West is deeply racist right but we do

know again as a matter of historical

record slavery was first challenged as

morally repugnant in Western nations and

in nations that adopted the philosophy

of the Enlightenment and it's only been

in places where those Enlightenment ideals have made inroads around the

world that racist ideas have been put on the defensive Wes is deeply sexist right

but then if we look at the status of

Western women right over the course of

the last 200 years not that also problems have been solved here but it is

a very progressive story Western

capitalists are cruel to the poor well

tell you if you want to be poor you want

to be poor in Canada

all right or the United States right and

so on all right for various reasons all

right now those are just potshots right

so to speak those are argument starters right the

clever postmodernists of course have thought about these things they will

have some responses but these are useful

salaries but I want to now do a none

postmodern thing and actually look at

some data data facts logical

interpretations mathematic statistics

etc etc if you're an Enlightenment guy

you think those matter right I think we

should be using them against the

postmoderns the dim ruins of the

Enlightenment the failure of the

Enlightenment project let's look at some data are we interested in poverty all

right this is a beautiful website I wish

I had this when I was a student right

but it's a Gapminder it's a Swedish site

I invite you to go to Gapminder you can

do beautiful things with the data playing around with it but this is a

charge this is the world in 1812 the

numbers superimposed here what we have

on the vertical axis is life expectancy

in years so starts at 20 25 30 right and it goes

on up to 85 for sneaky reasons that we

will reveal in a few seconds here along

the bottom here we have income measures

we have both GDP gross domestic product

and then we also have purchasing power

parity and adjustment for inflation who

want to keep these numbers across both

what you earn and what you can buy with what you earn and we want to compare

different nations with each other each

of these circles is a nation right in

the world so there's actually a 180 something circles there they are big

circles big population small circle

small population and they're also

color-coded for what part of the world

you are in so all of these kind of I know pumpkin colored ones those are

European nations this yellow one here

that's the United States right in 1812

that one right there that's Canada in

1812 the dark blue nations are

sub-saharan African nations the big blue

and the light blue one of them vary the South Asian Nations and so forth

okay so point then is I'll give you some

numbers here that's 400 that's a

thousand this is two thousand four thousand this is also a logarithmic

scale it's doubling for each right unit

of of territory here as we go go along

but what this then is to say is if you go to 1812 right all of the countries

the country that has the highest life

expectancy in the world it's about 42

and it's a GDP about 3,800 that's the

richest country in the world in 1812

guess which one it is

that's England all right so this is

England right about 50 years after the

Industrial Revolution it started the

first nation of the light mint and it's

already breaking away right from the

pack if you go to 1712 England is right down around here that's the United

States right this is France right this

is Germany and these are Western

European nations and then Canada's

lagging a little bit right behind okay

jump ahead 100 years we'll go to 1912

okay so we're over 1812 1912 one century

all right that again is the United States but

notice how much bigger it has gotten

population is increasing all right

income right United States income was

down around here twenty-two hundred dollars or so now it is about eight

thousand all right there's Canada

keeping company these are all Western

European nations these are two East

Asian nations that have opened

themselves up to trade with the West right in the previous generation not of

other countries they're all still

stacking around but notice what we have is most of Europe and North America and

two East Asian nations have significantly improved life expectancy

we're now got some nations in the 50s

right flirting with sixty right at that

point all right one more hundred years we'll go to two hundred thousand and twelve

basically our generation that's what

happened in the last century okay so

United States right even bigger Canada

is in there Japan Singapore Hong Kong

all the Western European nations these

are now the Eastern European nations

this is now after the fall of Soviet Union one generation this is where the

log scale becomes important because you

know if you take these Eastern European

nations here right that's about eighteen

thousand dollars for a person standard Western European nations it's in the 30s

so it's more than double these are the

two North American nations these are the

Latin American nations right I believe this one is Mexico right so Mexico is

around fifteen thousand right despite

proximity to Arizona if you're in

Arizona right you're about fifty thousand so the

powder makes a big difference there as well but look at the sub-saharan nations

all of them all of them were down here I

don't know what parts of the world you

travel to I always tell my students to go to Mexico and often they do for

spring break and so forth they all come

back and say you know the poverty in Mexico I just can't believe how awful it

was it was just horrible

there really is horrible right by

American standards and by Canadian standards but yeah there's the yeah the

Mexicans are right there by historical

standards that's not bad

okay now of course if you're a Mexican

right and you go to some of these sub-saharan African nations right it's

pretty grim but this is the striking

point I want us to get to these are all

three of the charts here every single

country in the world right 200 years ago was right down there that is to say all

of the countries in the world were in

this lower left quadrant there's nobody

there anymore life expectancies have

doubled even in the poorest nations of

the world income has in some cases

doubled tripled quadrupled right and so

forth in a space of 200 years so when

someone says what happened in the

Enlightenment was a mistake right

philosophically an institution we write there's some data that speaks

to that right because that looks like a

success story to me if you think living long and wealthy is a good thing and I

do so are you interested in racism and

sexism of course we are yes this is basically the twentieth

century story about women's education in North America heavily skewed by American

data so this each of these lines is a degree so bachelor's degree master's

degree doctoral degree law degrees medical degrees right early part of the

20th century and part of the 20th

century the trend lines are all up right

significantly in fact for bachelor's

degrees and master's degrees it's now 60

to 70% of all of them are women right

it's the men who are having more troubles so getting those degrees right

and so forth and that looks like success

to me and that's in the Enlightenment

right to touch the nation's racism

sexist re racism right and so forth this is the story right slaves or serfs in

the world in 1750 by this measure about

76 percent of the world's population was

either a serf or a slave right at that

time enlightenment is just starting its

push to say there's something morally repugnant about slavery let's do

something about that and this is the

story right until now we get to our

generation and we still have slavery and

serfdom right in the world but a very

small minority of the population and

we're still going after that that looks like a success to me this is a survey

published in 2013 you can get this at

Washington Post measuring racial

tolerance right one of the questions

they ask is how comfortable are you living with someone in your neighborhood

who's of a different race right over

neighborhoods and so there's dozens of questions that mine that territory and

what we find is in all of the blue right

those are the nation's where people are

fine with it the vast majority of people

you find fewer than 5% of the pop

relation saying no I actually have a

problem living with someone whose skin is not my color other parts of the world

the data is of course much more mixed

and much more the other way but again

it's not accidental right that the

nations that are the most blue right are

the ones that are the most touched by enlightenment philosophy and that looks

like a success to me so I'm going to

assert there's a fact that the progress

right has been real but I'm highlighting

the philosophically charged terms

because I said fact and I said progress

and I said real ok and the philosophical

debate right is is joint now of course

all of this has huge implications for

the culture wars and if you don't

believe in facts you don't believe in

progress you believe in the opposite of that you don't believe there is a real

biological or physical reality that we

are ultimately responsive to if you

think everything is about power and

social construction you will have a very

different agenda that's the one we're dealing with right right now and my

argument is well if your agenda whatever

your agenda is the facts and the logic

are against you and I think they are

against post-modernism you should expect

some non factional factual non-logical

non civil right non liberal arts

education responses to it you will find

a very negative hostile uncivil warlike

response and that's what we're seeing

manifested and I now think of as third generation post-modernism and that's

what we're dealing with right now all

right so that's my book some of the

theses there I'll stop at this point and

my hosts will let me know how much time

I have to field questions so please have at it ah you guys get to go first nice okay

good oh well thank you left versus right

and we're different ideas and party sit

on that and you mentioned fascism in

your talk the teacher had fascism at the

far-right and socialism economy doesn't

have a far left it my son didn't understand what units of measure were

for this okay good

so that price spectrum is garbage so the

way that they were used now is more or

less accidental packages so there's this

package so in the United States you're a

liberal or conservative there's not

necessarily any internal coherency

between all the elements right of the

package and we just all have left and right for for various reasons and the

pretense then is that it's just a one

dimension right along which we get measured that's exactly right the

problem so when you start to flesh

things out we do know there are tribal

isms and there are futile isms and there

are fascism x' and there are social isms

and there are libertarianism and

classical liberals and so far there's no way to put them all on one spectrum

right from from left to right so I'm

actually surprised that your son is still getting that executives remember

typing the exact same question right when I was a freshman didn't write in

university so this the idea was that you

know Hitler is at the far right and you

know Stalin is at the far left and so

then I don't know where were you put to

Thomas Jefferson right if you like a

compromise yeah so if we're supposed to

say on this it doesn't make any sense

right or if you kick it up to the theoreticians right so we've got you

know Giovanni Chantilly and one of the

philosophers of fascism right you know

we got Karl Marx but where do you put John Stuart Mill you know somebody's

borrowing this from the Communists and

this from the fashion history and some

sort of packaging so it's inappropriate so I think good and you're partway

through your question you said the right thing is to say well what is the

dimension right that we're trying to measure as serious political scientists

will then start to take up that point so then you say for example yep who do you

think the polity is do you think the

polity is comprised of a number of

individuals and the polity is trying to

serve those individuals or anything that the polity is a collective and what

we're interested in is what's good for

the whole it is something that somehow the society as a whole should be coming

together so that then would be to say

you are having one aspect of your political spectrum should be

individualism to collectivism that's not the only

important political question another

important question is how much power and

authority who we think the government should have and so another one is to say

well government should be limited to

some very clearly defined functions

constitutionally prohibited from going

beyond those functions versus other

government types of politics to say we

think that women should be vested with large amounts of power large and right

amounts of authority so then a different

spectrum that says you know strong authoritarianism to

limited government minimal is about the

other spectrum and you keep going

through so what he will then end up with is a multi-dimensional analysis when

I've done this in my semi-professional

way I think there are five important

dimensions interests say its left and right it's fine to say I have defined

this dimension this is what we are

measuring and you can then therefore kissing I'm on the left or the right

here but that has to come after some

very serious work

Thanks hum over this cycle next question

you can stay by the free speech bubble

you like to a lot of people to have

their say but they just have to follow the rules and so I take it down question

from okay and it's very simple it's just

what Foucault a socialist I think

broadly speaking yes evidence would be

the fact that he joined the French

Communist Party in the 1950s

that's one datum

he was not a hardcore Stalinist and the

reason why he broke was that by the time

you got to the early 1950s it was very

clear that the French Communist Party was just taking marching orders from

Moscow and Foucault didn't have enough

of a anarchist anti-authoritarian Street that he couldn't stomach in fact I serve

people and he is one of the ones who

reflected on the fact that the socialist

Nations all of the ones that were claiming inspiration from March were

turning out to be very brutal right in

their practice and so he was enough

person to say this is not what I wanted

so he backed away from it but then at

the same time 15 years later he's wildly

enthusiastic right about what's going on in in China right under mama you know we

know now that Mao was slaughtering tens

of millions of people but Foucault is

out there waving the the Maoist bent

right so I think that counts as a datum

for being a a socialist he always

described himself as a as a man of the

left and in French intellectual circles

at the American scientist socialists so

I know that there are other elements

right enough soda about Foucault he did

evolve over time so I think that point you can say he was last socialist or

more socialist but that's the territory he was working most of his career

a true partner is legal I'll be very

very ok so I notice positions could be

regarded as some kind of post post

modernist yeah all right so the Beatrice okay yeah I wrote a book on each end the

Nazis is each other and influence on an

enormous range of people in the 20th

century all the political map and so on

but yet Nazis did see him there the

extent to which that's legitimate by

them or not is the subject of that but

yes one of the things that need you is famous for is his account of master

morality and slave or out and ultimately he was a power politician didn't believe

in truth and so it's Department by the

postmodern see him as a forward right so

everything is perspectival and science

is a is a psychological projection right

on a messy reality right and so on so

the postmodernist to some extent do

legitimately see Nietzsche as a 4-letter

often filtered through Heidegger who

also was a deeply read in nature the

idea is ultimately it's its power power

works through us and constitutes us but

there are different focuses of power

capture and different social groups and

so we have to understand things sociologically in terms of power

struggles and some dominated some ability so on so all of that is very

neat you to go back to the Foucault

question at one go settle themselves you know you get

there down to it I'm just basically a

nutrient and I just I tried to read

things so that's the positive claim that

says Nietzsche to the post modernists

legitimate story that can be Twitter but

at the same time this is the first question that you raised over taking

them in reverse order there is an

obvious way in which Nietzsche would be

disgusted with post-modernism because

one of the things we find in post-modernism is this idea of

victimization and that when you are the

strong group versus weak group well if

you really believe it's strong versus we

do have a value choice to me right am I going to be on the side of the strong

and say you know it is a dog-eat-dog world and there's not going to be lunch

I'm gonna be one of the ones that eat

lunch that means I have to be tough and

willing to dominate right and so forth or am I going to say yeah the world is

dog-eat-dog but I really feel sad and

you know I wish they had and so all of

us want to get together and we heard

together for safety right against the

big bad ones and form alliances and so

forth now that's metaphoric alright but

we do have right literally are in

post-modernism systematic identification

with any group that has a victim claim

and the victim claim is always valorized

right and you're the mark of your being

a moral person is your identification

group and one of the political tactics

that you use to advance is you play up

your victim status right because that

then leads you to various kinds of areas right and so forth so neat you know of

course himself is on the other side of that divide he didn't say the world is

power or strong versus weak but his view was that if we are going to advance the

human species it's not going to be the weaklings that get us there right it is

going to be the strong the powerful who

have an agenda and who are willing to dominate other people even to the point

of slavery it was it was never slavery

to make people I used their energy and

used their power for my own agenda and

that's going to enabled me to do something great so Nietzsche I think in

his benefit and epistemology is very

much what the postmodern rooms are

drawing upon in his value theory and his

politics he is anti postmark I'll go

back over here my first question that I

came prior to this event wanting to ask

the boat and I think I still cannot ask every hearing it has to do with the law

and recently in Canada there was a a

decision made where a person was found not guilty but primarykey o stone and

then I was reading later and analysis

have done about sort of an analysis from

a Marxist piece of writing where they

talked about the person's fear in the

situation that they were in is being

perceived and that that's why

in the act that they did which they were accused it being crime at Seoul so

there's about the language we talked about linguistics and language so that's

my main question has to do from long ok

surrounding with that here I presumed

innocence is what I'm talking about okay

for something else which is has to do

with we're talking about this evening I

was wondering where the work of genius

Bob would fit into the because to me it

seems very Johann Sebastian Bach baroque

music that's a very interesting question

but one of the things that's interesting

in the development music is you know all

the data that shows that having a

mathematical mind and able to have

large-scale abstract structures and to

sustain that over time is essential

right to the development of great decomposing so we might then float a

hypothesis right historically that

large-scale musical pieces that are

integrated and mathematically interpret can only happen in a culture that has

widespread but respect for reasoning and

some facility with mathematical ease no

that's just a hypothesis and I would

just put it up there for investigation but then the the timing of the great

explosions of certain kinds of music

writing in the West we fit and they would track on to the development of

early enlightenment thank you your first

question I'm not sure I'm going to get into quite

but it's question above law presumption

of innocence someone did something but

their explanation for why they did that

was their their their their feelings in

response to how they thought someone else was perceiving them am i okay

I just I guess I probably get into the

question but there's no cases with

authorities about the perception in

Saskatchewan was a huge supporter of a

used and then he was found not guilty

and so then afterwards everyone that was

objecting to the decision that he was

not killed to him I would only think

that they must have thought that he is

guilty because they claimed there was no justice but my opinion is that there's

no evidence to prove the person guilty then you would be unjust to find them guilty and the other thing being the

critique that Iran of the outcome from

these Marxists was that his fear that

someone was going to harm him was

perceived freedom something that was

all right yell at me okay I don't know

the particulars of the case in Saskatchewan so I won't be able to give

a that part but one of the things that was

part of your practice is finding the

presumption of innocence and another

part was question what do we make of the

status of evidence if it is first person reports of a person's feelings in

contrast to evidence that is objectively

verifiable by any number of parts and I

would say yeah absolutely

if you're a mr. Mulvaney crumbles than

all of those procedural issues about

what counts as legitimate evidence in a court of law are going to change their

grandeur crumble right and go away and

courtrooms ultimately will then there's become subjective battlegrounds right in

the worst sense and I think that's all I

can say without knowing the particulars

of that case so given that I assume

others agree that subjectivism and

anti-realism is perhaps not the best way

forward what would in your opinion the

best way for for someone who wants to

take the Objectivist

real disposition to answer the

admittedly difficult challenge that the

post modernists present which is

choosing your assets and how do you

choose those give it up nothing else to call right okay yes sir good questions

about terror where one starts here all I

would say is you should get courses

ready in history philosophy and perhaps you're right you have all done so and

for me the issue is going to

the level of perceptual rate analysis or

you get the logic before that the

concept is what is the human consciousness is first point of contact

for the next general rule under standard

realistic layman's that we have a five

sensory organ acquisition in direct

contact with the world if you can maintain at that claim they don't amazes

of that you can go on to build up the

more sophisticated cognitive things that

we can do we can form abstractions they

start taking those abstraction putting together into proposition pretty the

proposition together theories that ottoman words are not there's even more

sophisticated scientific back then but

my reading of the history of philosophy is that in the modern world one of the

things that play modernism all that she

was that it was not able to and a direct

realism an exception and that might be

what kind of representation ISM and what

you have that big goal between the subject of the object at what the mind

or so to speak is where it was an internal subjective representation it

may or may not accurately force longer

what's out there you are in a box that you're never going to get out of it so

I've written two books the station public perception and this

is not using an accident but a master of

action for any vaccine come a little bit

later because they are sophisticated conceptual identifications and proposition is first of all government

recommend is by changing Hinson through the psychologist at Cornell University

on the physiology and psychology

exception I think even brilliant other than experimental psychologists of

perception and also that he gives a very

strong direct response to the Conte and

how the public understands perception of

course clock is drawing on both the

raggedness and the appearances tradition

both had their fall so eventually take a

Gibson or other and I will mention is

even Kelly are you an interestingly was

a PhD student of richard rorty's but on

the other side of the philosophical maps

i just imagine how those conversations when but another very brilliant man

wrote a book 1986 all the evidence of

the senses and my view was

under appreciated classic of directness of perception so I started here at

entrance picked up for the top I really

broke down the timeline and the

development of postmodern time and I guess my questions particularly about

basically the last ten years off the developers particularly about

existentialism it seems like

existentialism impose bars over both

kind of like these they kind of take a

lot from me - Heidegger's lines and

thinking but they're also kind of almost

diametrically opposite like extensive

pretty into creating individual identity

it's very valid positive ways because

great prisons but post - breaking anything it's a lot of responsibility

other and yeah I could get me pasta

why that's what happened because I grew up reading a lot of a specialist and

then I started reading the post one is

it was like everything like this ugly

deformed cousin virgin that's a nice foot yeah that's good and

I think that's a very perceptive

question right I think most of the

extension was our generation earlier and so according to the biography so the

leading post modernists are all coming

of age in the 50s right but Sartre and

Camus are coming of age in the decades

right earlier to that so there's a bit

of a chronological different but in terms of philosophical categorizations

the existentialists are still trying to

do some metaphysics and they're still

grappling with issues of human nature and even though Sartre goes say you know

existence precedes essence and there is

no human nature and so on he's not as

radical right about that as the later post modernist right will be Heidegger

as an existentialist if you wanted to

include the war German is still trying

to do some some benefits right he's

trying to figure out what really is the nature of being with respect to being a

capital D being right

so I would see that postmoderns are a

more ruthless derivation of the most

empty skeptical parts right that the

existential star grappling with the

existentialists are still believing that we can do some metaphysics that we can

find some authenticity that we can find

as creators right some genuine meaning

right in our life and I believe that the

postmodern is a banded back that's too

many physical as to positive normatively

so that was your grace a deformed cousin it's like a it's like the ugly you

learnt that what Ruby on the tape yeah we should

obviously existentialism has a

reputation for being too gloomy the life

is absurd God is dead and the world oh

and then we die and so on and all of the

existentialist will say if you were a

mature person you might have to go through that phase there's a deep fruit

but then there is pork in the road that some existentialist like canoeing its

are rated some moves and some of the

religious existentialist want to say we

can start there but nonetheless come up with a positive program right and the

postmoderns are the ones who say oh we

go there and we just that's not possible

we have to that would stay on the

negative path where they become increasingly nihilistic thank you so you

talking today a little bit about how the

most modernist were sort of king of âge

in the 1950s they're confronted with this reality that town so he's calling

us ideas were not being borne out of it

they thought they would that there were these awful things happening in Soviet

Russia things like that so I was just

wondering them so they're tact was to switch what was important with this kind

of subjectivity and now in 2018 you know

I'm fairly confident the American

president never read this book or as

early the post modernist but we do see

this sort of fake news phenomenon the

iessons so I was wondering that in your opinion

if the faking this phenomena this may be

sort of a type of mechanization of

post-modernism or just your thoughts on

the fake news phenomenon gentle right so

focuses really on this the first two

generations another stop story so and

what you're asking about what report

about the most recent generation that's

that's a perfectly legitimate question I think the most lurid strategy is general

in one sense and that I can attach to

any political program any time you're in an argument you're losing an argument

right if you say well it's just semantics here's the breathing space so

you play that that the histological card

right so or all facts are just being up

facts anyways and I could just question

your sources and that's the way but the

point is going to be that any movement

that gets itself in trouble will find

itself resorting to those kinds of defensive strategies and the fact that

the far left was in the political

trouble in the nineteen fifties in the 1960s they just got their first but I

think what has been happening is that

obviously other parts of the wording

they can adopt the strategy those

tactics as well so one of the very

interesting things is that in the 1990s

this is now one generation after

left-wing post-modernism right is in

place you start to read in some forms of

theology high Christian theology that

there working both over those modern themes we're putting them to service in

maintain a certain kind of Christian

religious right senator and there are

the immediate things but we're having these battles with these evolutionists

we have Ellucian dismal hell science

facts logic right excited said I'm on

their side and we can't fight that battle so what

we need is an epistemology that enables

us to undermined the claim that says

facts logic scientific mathematics in

the service elevator religion

I think the all right now politically

right is doing the same sort of thing

and then people from any part of the political spectrum if your view is to

say you know the truth and justice don't

really matter in politics all it really

matters is power and you know there any

number of people in any generation ruled

that way they will and say yeah they

news and real news there is no difference right between those two

everybody's playing the fake news game

and our drugs just do it better than

anybody Thanks okay five minutes so how

about this view each one related

question in 30 seconds and I'll try to

do I'll give myself 40 second five

seconds to respond yeah do i close test

which rarely speak therefore the silence

if you think that the most artists

misinterpreted this line positive specific if so was it because

of an inability to navigate the paradox

before trembling with wicked science any

kind of close to the tractates whether he got that right right or not I

don't think so right because it's an

anti metaphysical move saying there's

certain things we can talk about soldier

has to close off certain branches of subject and most of the the positive is

a lot of positives at that point are and he outlines a difference in your project

of saying can't do metaphysics with

weekend through productivity right queries wordy whether you got it right

or wrong when he cites his big three if

he does say movie thickens fine and high

leader and he's got a certain spin on Dickon Stein or we can argue about that

but I do think that big design said the period he's playing with fire okay that

feeds into post-modernism so as you've

highlighted currently the post monitors are monthly and not to say the least if

they reject power and exploitation how's it possible to organize a socialist

state and if objectivity is subjective

and how they post blunders justifying the entire nation to trust their one

leader to be objectively correct and by

the way you describe those modernist and

their exploitation of ideology to justify that underlying agenda would it

be more accurate to label these people have some sort of revolution

[Music] Wow I want to take the first part of

that question over the shade the

post-modern don't merge a Kakaako I

reject certain forms of power most postmoderns will say that basically this

benefits will stratum of the university

we're allowed to talk about that just is

power and the only thing is the side of

the power imbalances you are on their

allegiance is to be historically losing

in groups and they just one of marshal

power anything's fair there is only

power I'm just worried how you escaped

becoming a postmodernist yourself a

university major influences work yeah

well I think I escaped because when I

went to university I wasn't planning to

be a philosophy percent planning to be an architect and an engineer don't why

don't I can build a thing so I really

just got my undergraduate degree in philosophy for fun because I wanted to

have a whole bunch of books to read even

know what I was supposed to read when I

was pursuing my architecture of

engineering career so maybe that meant I

was a little bit insulated from taking

it too seriously you know I didn't take

it seriously right when I went to

graduate school and when I started teaching there after so so I I made the

biological urges or the biographical

one's not going to carry very far I

think if you're an engineer you want to build things you take reality seriously so maybe that's right deeply in my bones

I may be that knocking

but that still is my good readers to say

what I think you're not giving the other

side's arguments a fair shake but there

we would have to engage the arguments hi

I wanted to know one thing one things

you find when you're arguing with

post-modernism or post modernist

rhetoric whether it's like a fight fan

of Lacan or just somebody engaging a bit

of sort of fashionable deconstructivism

if the Apocrypha comes out and they're

more than happy to lay out words just you know if keep in mind the language is

just made by cisgendered web men to keep

their hegemonic control over culture and

then you know use definitive words you

know whenever it is convenient for them so how can you call that out knowing

that the most people in the public sphere because you're not going to

convince that person to convince the

people around you are not going to respond well the huge way this is post

modernism look you know people will suddenly become very interested so how

do you call that you have to be clear who you're if you're interested if you

find someone who fits that category

they're serious post one in it then your strategy either has to be I

like arguing about this sort of stone I

want to sharpen our very horrible tools and improve or you might just say it's a

waste of time you that was Marcus

ultimately even if I have to learn

change their mind is that top of their

agenda is or you might then say the root of my audience is people who are

listening to us happiness too baby I know they've heard those arguments by

one thing idea kind that is useful though is with what modernist is just

say something obviously wrong any of

those so say you know who come over

before he died said that no way that is

false we believe certain things people

didn't believe certain things you know

performative contradiction somebody like

that that's that's a bit cheap but often

cheap shots work I get to those whatever

the closer okay I really love the

presentation although we would like to personally through second this is about

the origin of the post mortem excuse my

clumsy English describing fugu as

building this theory to justify the failure of community 50 seems a bit

you know I think if it doesn't cover the

broad spectrum of the context of Kerala

there weren't in Indochina

or war to Algeria was happening at that

time and I think that it is losing some contributions of possible arizim around

the constructing into structure that

this course we're a freshman giving

place Foucault was thinking about

madness quality he was thinking about

the structures of power in Polish

village so a Hebrew name which are

significant contributions in trying to understand what's the role this course

in the oppression of within the society

all right very good

so I would say what you said about Foucault is exactly right but you would

also be able to say the same sorts of

things about Maureen and legal tar and dairy doll I did each of them is unique

and post-modernism is a bit of a broad

legal and they have disagreements right among them and each of

at different contexts and is responding to a particular issue so if we were to

drill down to Foucault in the 1950s and

his break from from from from a trencher

Communist Party was one of the things

that's going on his having finished his

PhD degrees and we're working on his

first sets of projects right what

exactly is going on in his mind he fits

into this story but obviously there are other things that are going on right for

him for him as well let me just say

though also I have been very critical along on post-modernism but I do think

that all of them are brilliant and there

are some things in in Foucault that I

that I like because he does have kind of

an anti-authoritarian street that comes

out on a fairly regular basis that

prevents them from being lip service to

anyone right kind of ideology and you do

get the sense that he's he does have

some genuine humanity right in him that

he's not utterly nihilistic the way some

of the other postmoderns are so for each

of these guys as individuals yet there would be a much more nuanced story that

we would have to tell so but necessarily

when you scale how at a movement level you can only say broad stroke of things

like subjectivism and skeletons and

skepticism our operative here in varying

degrees among these people and a certain

kind of reaction to coming out of the

far-left políticas is going on even

though the weights are going to do different for each individual thinkers so absolutely

ok I think we're out of time No No thank you very much [Applause] [Music]

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