The Enlightenment and the Pursuit of Happiness Transcript: Speaker 1 So the starting point is taking a look at what the world was like before the Enlightenment. And to appreciate what it is that they gave us. Start backwards, if you like. 17th, early 18th century. If the world was going to get better, we’d have to wait for the Messiah to come. Or we’d have to wait to die, and then if we were lucky, we would go to heaven. The idea that people working together could actually make changes in improving human dignity and human freedom was a brand new idea. So by the way, was the pursuit of happiness. I mean, happiness was something that either we lost in the Garden of Eden or some other golden age, or something we would get when we would die. The idea that people honor us, how to write to happiness, is brand new. Start there. Start with the idea that each of us is endowed with human reason that allows us to question what’s natural. And then think about what was natural at the beginning of the 18th century. Futile hierarchies, slavery, the oppression of women, most forms of illness. All of those things were taken, in fact, in parts of the world well into the 19th century as that’s just nature. So the idea that we can use human reason to ask whether some tradition that we’ve been told by some authority or some religious thinker is God’s will or part of the way the world is, that’s An enlightenment idea. (Time 0:36:50)
Kug’s Slippery Argument for Opposing Prison Reform Transcript: Speaker 1 So again, Foucault is a, you could call him the grandfather of woke if you like and he’s the most quoted thinker in post-colonial theory. And again, what’s confusing about Foucault is he has this very transgressive aura and being openly gay at a time when people weren’t even beginning to imagine marriage equality was Part of that. But it wasn’t all of it. He came on like someone who is in order to convention is ready to turn everything over. But he is somebody who flouts or simply rejects all three of the principles that I think are central. First of all, he’s not exactly tribal, but he says it in a certain point the human was in invention of the 18th century. And that’s true, except it was a good thing. It was a good thing when people began to start thinking of themselves as part of a large, you know, a much larger group than their family or their tribe and thinking of things that they Had in common and acknowledging the dignity in other beings who looked very different from them or perhaps behave very differently from them. So he’s not wrong to say that it’s a constructed concept, but I think we should look at it as an achievement. Human rights are claims meant to curb naked assertions of power. Speaker 3 They insist that power is not merely the privilege of the strongest person in the neighborhood, it demands justification. Remember the history in which claims to human rights arose. Speaker 1 It was unthinkable that peasants and princes could stand anywhere on anything resembling equal footing. Speaker 3 If the peasant took the prince’s deer, he could be hanged. If the prince took the peasant’s daughter, that was just the way the world was. Universalist claims of justice meant to restrain simple assertions of power were often abused from the American and French revolutions that first proclaimed them to the present Day. Think of the war in Iraq. You may think that power grabs are the best we can do, or you may go to work to narrow the gap between ideals of justice and realities of power. Speaker 1 There’s a terrific television kind of debate from about 1970 between Foucault and Chomsky on Dutch television. You can get it on YouTube. It’s still floating around there. That’s a point where he says justice is basically a sham. There are power relations. Yes, I want there to be a world revolution, but only because I want my people to be in power and incredibly pessimistic. Totally pessimistic. Just any claim to be working towards justice is simply trying to pull the wool over people’s eyes whom you want to oppress. And then finally, his view about progress is something that I think has been incredibly influential. Probably his most widely read book is called Discipline and Punish, and it begins with the graphic description of the horrible drawing and quartering of someone who tried to assassinate King Louis the 15th. Everyone remembers that passage. Most people don’t remember anything else from the book. And it’s used as part of an argument to say, well, this sounds horrible. And of course, we’re all going to react very fascinated but also nauseated by it. But he then goes on to give his readers the impression that actually reforms, prison reforms, were actually much more insidious, much more sinister and much more dominating than old Fashion drawing and quartering. And therefore, Kug gets very slippery. If you try to say, wait a sec, are you really saying that being in prison is worse than being drawn and quartered? His response would always be, what a vulgar question. You know? No, I’m not going to say something is better or worse. But in fact, the impression that he leaves people with is better not try to do any prison reform because you’ll only wind up making things worse. You taught us, we taught this for the same, you (Time 0:39:17)
The Connection Between Vocation and Nationalism • Nationalism is the political form of tribalism. • Vocation and nationhood are not always connected. • Benjamin Netanyahu uses nationalism to stay in power. Transcript: Speaker 2 You tackle how this whole conversation connects to nationalism. And I want to talk about that. You see a connection or a lack of connection between vocation and nationhood. I wonder if in this context, I wonder why is nationhood even on your radar? Why are you thinking about that in terms of vocation? Speaker 1 I mean, I talk about tribalism. And nationalism is, I suppose, the political form of tribalism. And nationalism is simply the idea that the only real connections that we have with people, the only really deep connections that we have with people. And therefore, the only political obligations we have towards people are those who belong to our tribe. And this is something that I’ve won Israeli friend who’s pointed this out. I’m the second person who’s pointed it out in print. And I hope it will get around to certain people who are woke. The reductio-out absurdism of the tribalism of the woke, including basing tribalism on victimhood, is Benjamin Netanyahu. That is exactly what he has done and how he has stayed in power, insisting that, first of all, because we were victims, we can do whatever we want. And anybody who denies that is simply contributing to our victimhood by being anti-Semitic. (Time 0:47:03)
The Importance of differentiating left from woke Transcript: Speaker 2 One other quick question before we go is a question actually you posed in the book yourself. You say at a moment when anti-democratic nationalist movements are rising on every continent, don’t we have more immediate problems than getting the theory right? So let me ask you that same question. Speaker 3 Don’t we have more immediate problems? No. I worried about that initially. Speaker 1 And then I began to see two things. One is the sectarianism of the left, and I use the, phrase the narcissism of small differences. It’s extremely disturbing that these right-wing nationalists manage to agree on principles of tribalism and work together, whereas people on the left tend to separate into smaller And smaller groups. And what I also realized, and I did ask myself that question as I was writing this, I see, first of all, people in the middle, people who are put off by wokism and are moving to the right. That’s happening all over the place. And then you have a kind of the silent progressive majority who are really disturbed and don’t feel they have a political home, don’t feel moved towards any kind of effective action Because they don’t agree with certain wok tendencies. They don’t want to criticize them because they’re worried about being put in a camp with Rishi Sunak or whoever. But they’re sort of staying on the sidelines until things calm down. So yes, I do think getting the theory right turns out to be important. (Time 0:52:06)
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