Is humanity on the right track?

Transcript

Transcribed by machine from the recording.

Scott Chris, good to see you again, my friend. We were just in the pre-show conversation talking lights, computers, opera houses, technology.

Chris Scott, always good. Yeah, we were warming up. Actually, for a few minutes there, I thought we were rolling tape. It's kind of sad that that's just going to stay between us.

Scott If you become a funder or something, we'll send you the pre-show tape.

Chris If you're like a top tier funder, we'll actually get it converted to some kind of physical film.

Scott Exactly. We'll send you a film.

Chris And then send you that. Whether you'll have the capacity to play it back might be a problem. But that's on your end. That's on you.

Scott Yeah, I've thought about live streaming our conversations, but I'm trying to figure out how we would do it and keep the sound quality up, Blake. So in the future, our listeners, if you're listening to this and you would like to see us record this, parts of it, you're going through your day and you want to goof off at work and you want to see us on a Thursday morning record, let us know and I'll look into how we could do it and keep our sound quality as good as it is.

Chris That's going to be a stampede to the door for that one. Exactly. I'm just not sure if they're coming in or they're leaving. Or they're going out, right.

Scott Exactly. Hey, so you gave a seminar this week, right?

Chris Oh, so yeah. So I got to share this with you and everyone because it was super fun. I think we've talked about this before. I do quite a lot of education and workshops with senior executives, especially European, but they're kind of from all over the place through my affiliation with Oxford University. And so there's always people coming in who are kind of looking for the intellectual leadership of Oxford to help them make sense of the world. And it tends to be a lot of Thank you for having me. And so you've got all these senior executives who come with tons of anxiety. They want to kind of figure out the future and not be afraid of it and stop doing the wrong things and start doing the right things. And so you come into this intellectual community just hungry for ideas and guidance and direction. Of course, what they often don't realize is that The intellectual community is just as divided and confused as they are.

We just use more syllables to have the argument, have the conversation. But anyway, so Tuesday was another one of these. It was a kind of a group of 30 or 40, you know, sort of like high potentials who have been identified, whatever that means.

Scott I'm a solid middling potential.

Chris Are you a middling? No, no, no. Solid, solid middling. There would be – I'm sure in this day and age, there would be some sort of affirmation-giving group that you would belong to in any large corporation. You might be like one of the aspiring troublemakers or – We'll see you next time.

Scott The failing ones. But still, it's hard to sell that. When they're making a killing, it's hard to explain that to consumers.

Chris Yeah, that's true. And when you get inside these large corporations, that's one of a dozen giant questions that they're kind of working with and struggling with. They've got a whole other group that's trying to figure out, how do we work with the hospitals of the future? You've got a whole other group that's trying to figure out, where will the Thank you very much. All of these highly committed medical researchers, scientists who are in it for the science, who are there because inside the paywall I get a big budget to run my trials and come up with a bunch of funky molecules or whatever it is they do, but with just far more resources and far less kind of paperwork than they had when they were in some kind of academic research shop. Anyway, all that is context. So I walk in, they're in Oxford for a week, and I walk in on kind of the morning of day one, which is where I'm often brought in, and asked to basically talk about 21st century challenges. So like this very broad remit. So, you know, Chris, so this thing called the future, tell us about that.

And basically, to them, I represent their fear. I represent there's this change or unknown. The future is going to be what it's going to be. I don't know. So manage my fear for me. Take it away. Give me a structure or a framework for making sense of it so that we can then be comfortable.

Scott There was a meme going around Facebook. It was a picture of Howard Cosell standing next to OJ Simpson and Bruce Jenner from the 70s. He's like, hi, I'm Howard Cosell. I can see the future. And let me tell you what I'm seeing in the future for you two guys.

Chris That was great.

Scott So you're like their Howard Cosell.

Chris Okay, I'll use that next time. Maybe it'll help them understand what the relationship is meant to be. But anyway, so it happened that this time I was giving this workshop in a very unusual venue, which is, it's called the Oxford Union, and it's a debating chamber, a rather famous debating chamber. I mean, everyone has appeared in that chamber and given a talk, right, like from sort of, you know, Mother Teresa and You know, to Dalai Lama, to, you know, Justin Bieber, right? It's this famous venue.

Scott From the ridiculous to the sublime there. Yeah, no, that's right. Do you know, like, when Justin Bieber went to see Anne Frank's house, you know, tour the Anne Frank, he's like, he looks all emotional. He goes, I think she would have been a Belieber.

Chris Oh, my God. He did not say that.

Scott He did say that.

Chris I, you know, so he's my countryman, so...

Scott Canada has given a lot of great things musically to the world.

Chris Thank you, thank you. Let's just move on from that subject then. Well, I guess I brought it up, so it's my own fault. So this is a debating chamber, and it's one of the world's most celebrated debating chambers for competitive debate. And so you've got competitive debates happening there every week where you've kind of got a motion and then you've got speakers for the motion and you've got speakers against the motion. And so what I decided to do, kind of to push back against the idea that there is sort of one future or one narrative of the future, but also to have a bit of fun with that venue, is I decided that rather than tell them sort of what the future is going to look like, That I would stage a debate against myself. And so I set a motion, which was in kind of the classic style of motions in that debating house.

This house believes that humanity is on the right track. And then I had four people speaking for the motion and four people speaking against the motion. But all of those eight people were me. Wow. And I went back and... Talk about multiple personality disorder. It was a total mindfuck.

Scott Yeah, this is multiple personality disorder, man.

Chris But it was great. And so it was so much fun.

Scott Were you saying to yourself, why you are so persuasive, my friend?

Chris No, I was... I mean, you know, in good competitive debate, which, well, I don't know if I was good, but I used to do it. You know, it... Part of the art is the art of the well-turned insult. So I was throwing barbs at myself and undercutting myself and, you know, a lot of good rhetoric. But the way that the debate works classically, so one person speaks for the motion and then one person speaks against the motion for about five minutes each. And then you go back to the for and then you go to the against. And so I did that kind of ping pong thing. And I had sort of speaking notes laid out, sort of four seats on the left and four seats on the right. And I took off my blazer when I was speaking on the opposition side, and I put on my blazer when I was speaking on the proposition side, I think just to help me keep my head straight.

Scott So the blazer was for the motion?

Chris Yeah, because I felt like a lot of the people for the motion, it is kind of more— Highbrow. It is a bit more of a conservative argument, right?

Scott Humanity is on the right track. Or maybe privileged, also elite. So maybe you're the working class populist without the blazer. It was definitely a bit more— And you're the devos kind of, you know— Yeah. Okay, okay. I'm seeing it. There's a method behind your madness.

Chris Well, yeah, but, you know, which I only kind of figured out in retrospect. Like, oh, yeah, that did make sense, so I did it that way. But, you know, and it was kind of each round was sort of structured. This sounds so fun. It was a lot of fun. I actually, it went so well, and I got such great feedback about it, but I decided, so I decided I'm going to do a lot more of this. I'm going to try this a few more times. And see how it goes. Because the other thing that we did was after each round, rather than go immediately into the next round, I kind of paused the debate, turned to the audience, the people that were there, and asked them, okay, so what are some of the rebuttal points that you would want to make? And then part of the challenge that

I set with them and set for myself was that in the next round, in addition to kind of my prepared debate with myself, I would also incorporate the arguments that they were surfacing if I didn't already have them in.

Scott So it would— I hope you had a tip jar out, because, I mean, they really— This is well worth the price of admission.

Chris It was really fun. And, you know, at the end of it, one of the— One of the comments of one of the executives there was like, so I'm very curious, where do you stand on this debate? Because it was impossible to tell if you personally were for or against it, which was great. I felt like, you know, like, who is it? Bobby Fischer, you know, who would play chess and sometimes he would play against himself, you know, play equally hard, equally fair for and against, and he never lost.

Scott Yeah, I had a seminar leader when I was doing PhD work, and he was such a good teacher, and I would, you know, we didn't, ideologically, we were probably in different places on some things, and I would make a point, and he would repeat it back to me, even a little refined. I was like, exactly, you get it. He's like, yeah, I totally disagree with you, but yeah. So, it was so, like, he was able to say what I was advocating in a language as good or better than I was. I thought, what a mark of a master teacher. You know, it was just amazing.

Chris Well, so I don't think I'll give myself that kind of status, but it was a great learning experience, actually. You know, we talk a lot about, you know, it's sort of an idea that gets thrown out there. We've got to get good at shifting perspectives and to kind of understand the different sides of the argument. But to actually try to embody and advocate different sides of the argument in kind of, you know, the same half-hour Back and forth like a ping pong eight times really does, I guess, on the positive end, it helps one sort of personally to develop a kind of plasticity, a kind of flexibility that then, like after you go through that, you almost actively resist one-dimensional static assumptions and say, okay, now let's try to understand the full picture. But more cynically, more perniciously, and this is something that we kind of talked about in the debrief, is

how clearly it exposes that we do live in this moment where it is possible, and maybe this has always been true, but it seems especially easy right now to articulate compelling narratives On opposite sides of the same question that really leave people divided about what's right and what's the way forward. Kind of relates to our last conversation about truth. I think there were 35 people in the room and the vote at the end was 17 to 18. Oh, wow. Like they were split.

Scott Neatly divided between optimist and pessimist.

Chris Yeah, it was really interesting, you know, and it kind of developed thematically. So, you know, round one of the debate, I felt like the strongest argument to put forward for the proposition that humanity is on the right track. I said, well, you know, okay, so basically first thing you need to do is ask, well, what would it mean for humanity to be on the right track? And surely, if it means anything, it means that we're on the path of increasing levels of well-being. And so I argued that if you look at just the macro measures of health, wealth, of education, that we are clearly on the right track. And it's basically one of the chapters from my last book, Age of Discovery, the way that Life expectancy has leapt by two decades globally over the past 50 years.

Scott It's higher now, like everywhere. This is Pinker's argument in Enlightenment now.

Chris Yeah, exactly.

Scott Basically, any metric, like violence, poverty, there's not a metric. It's pretty hard... Now, a lot of times people, if you see him in public forums like Bill Maher or something, people are like, well, but there's still this, there's still that. He's like, no, I'm not saying we're optimal. I'm not saying everything, but I'm saying relative to any other time, right? It's not that there's not still racism or sexism or other problems in the world or income inequality, but relative to any other time, these metrics are all better than they've ever been.

Chris Yeah, yeah, that's right. I mean, name me a time was a line that I used a couple of times. Name me a time where we've been better off. And so then the first opposition has to take that and respond. And I think that the strongest response is, and I was talking to a business audience, so I used a business metaphor, but as soon as we focus on only the bottom line, that's when we hide all the problems that really matter, that really affect the well-being of the organization or of civilization. And kind of the argument that, yeah, okay, if the macro story is so clearly one of progress, Well, you know, what about the more micro story of the division of the winners and losers and the inequalities that are growing in society? And so, you know, I was able to throw some pretty startling statistics out.

Health, for example, we were in Oxford, England, and, you know, it's a dirty... It's a dirty truth, which is, you know, one that you can find in a lot of wealthy parts of the world. But in Oxford, the difference in life expectancy between the richest and the poorest parts of the city is about two decades. And that's not uncommon. That doesn't surprise me. Yeah, right? So, you know, we're talking about global gains at the same time that there is the The entire sort of, what's the word? The entire size of the gain can be eliminated if you just walk across the tracks, so to speak. So how can that be progress?

Scott Or similarly, you talk about- And this is the point you make in Age of Discovery, right? That one of the challenges in the Renaissance and now is how do you take the aggregate gain and make it more particularized? Because if you looked 100 years ago- I would guess that the same dynamic would have been true, but the rich probably live longer than the poor. Both of them are probably living shorter lives. But that doesn't make the inequality any less disturbing.

Chris So there's that argument that you can question the headline gains by exposing the depth of the divides, but you can also question the headline gains directly. A lot of these fancy global stats that the pinkers of the world throw out Most of the rest of Asia has just marginally improved. Extreme poverty has been increasing in Africa and Latin America. And so you're kind of left with, okay, so world outside of China, far more ambiguous story the last quarter century. And then you look at the China story and you ask yourself, is it right to simply hold that up as a success story? Right? Like, what about the costs there? And there's this entire urban underclass in China, people who are sort of peasants who have migrated from the countryside to work in the cities, but the way that residency rights work in China, they have no access to education for their kids or healthcare for themselves.

You know, you've got the Uyghurs in Xinjiang and the Tibetans in Tibet, these whole societies. That, you know, are, you know, depending on sort of what side of that issue you are on, but some people would say it's, you know, it's almost like a cultural genocide in the most rigorous or accusatory language one could use. It's a debatable point, but, you know, less debatable is that you've got a party state, a ruling class that spends more on internal security than public health care, right? And so kind of my opposition argument, and this was just round one, was to say that, wow, it sounds so great when you give the kind of Steven Pinker, everything is rosy view, but you could also argue that it's so short-sighted and it's so cruel to paint a big picture that is so bright and that is so blind to the real suffering. That is actually growing greater in pockets of every society.

Scott I can't believe nobody pointed out reality TV as an argument against emotion.

Chris No, no, no. Reality TV came up as an argument for the motion.

Scott John Oliver had a clip from Temptation Island or some British show. He's like, everyone's talking about Brexit. And it was even on this Temptation Island show. And this one was like, Brexit, does that mean it's going to be harder to get cheese? Like, it was just awesome. It was just awesome.

Chris Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey. Okay, so, like, this from the man who I know has now been religiously watching... What is that? That show is fantastic. That show is fantastic. I mentioned it to you. I didn't know that you would then go back and watch the entire series.

Scott Oh my gosh, that is quality television. I mean, whoever conceptually devised that show is a genius. That show is—that's great television.

Chris So, yeah, right. So, exactly. So that's why I say reality TV is where that fits in the argument, right? You took a lot away from that.

Scott I did. I did. My wife loves it.

Chris Oh, my God. Yeah, I can't look away. And, you know, so I thought that it was a, you know, and so the next round, of course, we talked about sort of science and technology. You know, the proposition, like the positive arguments around how science and technology is going, it like demonstrates that humanity is on the right track. I mean, anybody can make these arguments, right? Like we're... We live and breathe in a soup of techno-optimism. So it's not like it took a lot of work to figure out five minutes of bullet points of how great it is. Medical technologies, transport technologies, communication technologies. I guess, you know, given that I was in a university when I was talking about this stuff, I kind of focused more fundamentally on the science. And, you know, I think it's probably generally true. Like, you walk around any science quadrant, like the science areas, buildings of any research university,

And, you know, people are pretty stoked about the science that they're doing right now. Like, you know, I think I could go into any faculty, like the astronomy faculty, and they would tell you that, you know, the computer has meant more to the study of astronomy than the telescope ever did.

Scott Yeah, you could go in any, yeah, I would, in any field. Yeah, I mean, yeah.

Chris It's just, it's totally changed things, right? Because you think about, like, biology with a microscope. Okay, great. But that microscope is basically limited. Its power is limited to how powerful a glass lens you can grind and then how accurate the eyesight of the person peering through the eyepiece can be to capture that. Whereas when everything is digital, I mean, the ability of the machines to separate the signal from the noise, It isn't limited the way that our mechanical abilities to make tools or to see difference with our naked eye is. And so it's just completely opened up the universe of anybody who's doing work that fundamentally begins with gathering data. It's hard to argue that we're not on the right track. So that was actually a good point where I felt like I had made such a persuasive argument that I didn't know how the next speaker was going to rebut the argument. I love it. How would you rebut it? Things are getting better. Yeah, well, kind of like the scientific optimism and the technological optimism.

Scott I mean, there's... Science and tech is... I guess there's Blade Runner, you know, like... I mean, I think like the biggest issue, I mean, like climate, like we could wreck the planet.

Chris Yeah, and that's the direction I went. And so, you know, the fun thing about debating is that you allow yourself to use some pretty loose rhetoric, which was also the fun thing I discovered about the format. Like, rather than sort of standing up there and trying to know something and be an authority, which is always questionable, I was more able to just make arguments that, you know, in some cases, quite obviously, were maybe stretching beyond what the data supports. So I threw out this line, what do you think of this, that some would argue, I didn't know that it was true, I didn't hold myself to it, but I threw out there as kind of a rhetorical argument against the techno-optimists, that some would argue that knowledge has killed more people in human history than ignorance.

Scott Thanks for watching!

Chris Remember that Union Carbide, which was this toxic chemical disaster in 1984? It was the biggest industrial accident of the 20th century. You ever remember hearing about that? I don't think I remember. Okay, well, Americans. Exactly. Ignorance is bliss. Anyway, so Union Carbide, big chemical industrial company, had this massive chemicals plant in Bhopal, India, and in 1984, toxic gas that killed... Thank you very much. Mass starvation from India's borders, right? That was the intended consequence. But it kind of demonstrated how badly things can go wrong when, you know, you treat technology like just a material thing and you ignore all of the social stuff that goes with technology, like the assessment of risks and regulations and ethics and even like public awareness and participation and like, so what is this thing and how is it used and what are the consequences for us? Just how badly we can get things wrong. We fail to see all the social consequences.

Scott This is Postman's argument in Technopoly, right? It's one thing when the culture's problems drive the technology, and then another thing when the technology drives the culture, and he thinks that's a technopoly, where the culture starts to serve the technology, and it kind of runs out of control on its own steam. And I think that, yeah, you could argue that that diminishes the human spirit.

Chris Well, not only diminishes the human spirit, but kind of exposes society to risks. And kills people. Yeah, but exposes us to these big-scale risks. The same way that the boom in transportation networks exposes us to pandemic risks, or the boom in digital communications exposes us to infrastructure risks, like solar flares and things. Thank you very much. And it's interesting thinking about something like that as an example of a solar flare. Like, wow. So nothing that we've done, that humanity has done over the past 50 years, has had any effect on the likelihood of some devastating solar flare. The only question is... Are we in their path when they happen? And when we are in their path, because sometimes we are, how big were they? But it's just probability. Eventually these things do happen. And then I guess climate change is maybe the most obvious example of the kind of unintended consequences of technology, like the unintended risks. Michael Garfield, Slavoj Žižek, Jordan Peterson

Scott Yeah, I think that's possible. It's interesting. I had this guy on Give and Take who wrote an amazing book about climate change and nuclear power. I mean, the book is fantastic. But he talks about one of the things about climate change that's so pernicious.

Chris Yeah, yeah. So the psychology actually becomes really important, right? So that was what? The second person against the motion sat down. So I sat down.

Scott The second person, meaning you.

Chris Yeah, yeah. Actually, like the fourth speaker, me, the second opposition to the motion sits down. And then I kind of crossed the floor and I had to think about, oh, okay. So that was a good argument. How to come back against that. And it was about this way, like halfway through the debate where I really started to, you know, kind of, you know, poke barbs at myself. So I kind of, I stood up at the podium and looked at the person who had just sat down and, you know, kind of wondered aloud. What bad things must have happened in the youth of this person on the other side that he has such a cynical view of humanity? He's Canadian. And has so little faith in our ability to solve problems. Which I thought was, yeah, we all had a good laugh. Because so much of these questions about should we focus more on the opportunities or risks do kind of come down to are you a cynic or are you optimistic? Do you think that we have it within ourselves to recognize and respond to admittedly much bigger risks than we've ever faced in the past? And so the optimist says, yeah, sure we do. I mean, you know, I know it's hard to believe, but some of our tax dollars actually are well spent in the sense that, you know, good disaster preparation does take place in the FIMAs of the world and the UK and the Canadian and the European equivalents. I mean, if, for example, there is a kind of, what was that film, Contagion? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So like this pandemic, it's a good film, right?

Anything with, what's his name? Anyway, always good. You know, in the event that there is some kind of highly contagious and deadly airborne virus that's detected, I mean, none of us are getting onto airplanes, right? Like quarantine protocols are going to shut the world down and contain this as much as possible. And those plans are in place, right? You know, so we have learned how to contain risks like that, even climate change. And, you know, I know it's difficult, you know, especially with what's happening in the US to feel optimistic about this stuff. But, you know, just setting that aside for a moment, like the Paris Accord, which was, I guess, what, 2015 now? Yeah, I think it was late 2015. That was actually the first time in world history that virtually every government in the world agreed to a policy because of science, which is kind of like, I guess it's just lost in the excitement of everything else that's going on in the world. But that is a huge thing, right?

And it says something about our capacity to be responsive to threats like this. And it suggests that actually, you know, as a species, even if it doesn't look like it, we are becoming more, our capacity to respond to like sort of what the evidence tells us is growing. It is headed in the right direction. So there is room to be, yeah, to kind of be justifiably optimistic that yes, big, big risks, but no, we shouldn't believe that therefore we're headed for catastrophe. And then I kind of expanded it into, because I felt like you got to end the positive argument with like, okay, so there are these macroeconomic and health and wealth realities There is the science and technological enthusiasm that we should feel great about. And then there is also just enormous political and cultural and social change that is also in a direction that we should fundamentally look at as a good thing.

Like, you know, democratization. And yeah, it's taken a sort of some knocks lately, but since the 1970s, the number of democracies sort of, you know, in the world, I mean, it used to be, yeah, 40 years ago, it was maybe one third of UN member states. Now it's like three fifths. This is also some of Pinker's argument and stuff. So, you know, across most of the world now, The idea of rule by the people is the dominant ideology of how society should be governed. Same with market economics. I mean, you know, love it or hate it. I guess the proposition would kind of say, you know, name me a better system. But, you know, again, since sort of the 70s or 80s, you know roughly three four billion more people have joined the global market economy and yes all sorts of negative consequences not to die on that but if you if you think in in terms of kind of

you know human fundamentals war and peace are the prospects for peace better now that most of the world with maybe the exception of north korea exchange within a a traded market system you know most people would argue that It's better.

Scott Yeah, liberal democratic states, like small, like classical, liberal democratic states engaged in free market commerce generally don't go to war with each other.

Chris Yeah, that's right. You know, and it's kind of one of those truths.

Scott You have illiberal states go to war with each other, and illiberal states go to war with liberal states, but in general, liberal democratic systems don't, you know, no one's worrying about a war in Europe between liberal polities.

Chris Right. So there's this very broad argument. And again, it's kind of look at the macro picture is the subtext here. But this is a very broad argument that sort of between nations, barriers are falling. And we've got to kind of problematize that with what's happened the last couple of years. You know, in terms of politically and economically, there is more exchange and more sense of we've got a common interest here. And then you've got to look within societies. And within a lot of societies, you see barriers falling too, right? I mean, whether it's the Me Too movement or... You know, getting much more aware of our biases around gender and sexual orientation and ageism and all of these things, right, that there is definitely across a lot of the world a real campaign to recognize more and more forms of social exclusion, of kind of social and cultural walls, call them a bad thing and knock them down, you know, and And if you look at that progress of integration within societies, you kind of You know, you can justifiably go back to, you know, Martin Luther King Jr.

and his arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice and kind of argue that, yeah, you know, it's hard to deny in the big picture that we're still on that arc and that the arc is bending toward justice. And, you know, as Obama modified it, yes, it zigs and it zags. But the longer trend line is one that we should feel really optimistic about. So I kind of talked myself into being positive again.

Scott Yeah, I think also the interesting question to me in the midst of this debate is does human nature change? And that, I mean, people that argue it doesn't will sort of say that's why science fiction works so well, right? Because you can change the context and technology and have sort of interesting dystopic, utopic, middle-topic, like kind of... Middle Topic, that's a new one for me.

Chris I like that. So it's kind of like, wait, wait, wait, I got to stop on that for a second. So Middle Topia is where kind of everyone just walks around and shrugs their shoulders and says...

Scott It's like Target. It's not Walmart. It's not Nordstrom's. It's Target.

Chris Or as we say in Canada, we're a little more sophisticated.

Scott Yeah, exactly.

Chris Target. No, no, no. Target, yeah.

Scott Target in the French province. Yeah, I think that there's arguments to be made that there's a lot more continuity than discontinuity. And then there's a book called All Things Shining that came out a couple years ago, 2011 maybe. And it's a great book by Herbert Dreyfus and Sean Kelly. They're both Heidegger scholars and philosophers. And they kind of look at the classics as these – the subtitle is Reading the Classics in a Secular Age. They kind of argue that great books in these epic narrative traditions do shape human society such that, you know, they start with kind of Homeric gratitude for a plethora of gods, and they kind of look at what they see, I think, as a devolution to, like, David Foster Wallace's, like, paralysis before a plethora of choices, you know? And so they think that something is lost as you switch... They look at when you go from Homer to Aeschylus to Augustine to Dante.

The great saint for Dreyfus and Kelly is Melville and Moby Dick, because they think it's a kind of return to something like Homeric gratitude before a pluralistic, you know, palliative experience. But, I mean, that's a different kind of view. I mean, again, leaning on Heidegger, that... And I guess it also...

Chris How did you frame the question? Does human nature change? Because I guess also, you know, that kind of, oh, you would be such a good debater. You know, like if you were in the Oxford Chamber and you threw out that as kind of the twist about two-thirds through the debate, people would be like, oh, shit, that's a good one. Because, I mean, it fundamentally questions whether the motion that the House is debating Thank you very much. How can we possibly connect dots and draw a trend line that is either upward or downward? Isn't every generation basically Then going to tell the story that it wants for whatever the immediate purpose is. I need a downward trajectory story because I want to seize power by saying that we're on the wrong track. Or I need an upward trajectory story because I need to unify a population that has broken apart in argument about what track we should be on.

Scott Yeah, it's interesting, you know, TS Eliot, when he was like doing PhD work at Harvard in philosophy, you know, the big analytic philosophy was so big and, you know, the question is language meaningful when it's referential or not? Like is language just internally? The big proposition that they would debate in these seminars is, the present king of France is bald. Well, does that mean anything? Because there is no king of France, and yet these words all mean something. So is something meaningful that doesn't refer to the world? And so Eliot kind of fancifully said, well, there is a king of France after all. And by George, he's bald. And Eliot would say, even illusions have reality. They have illusory reality. These are questions that are interesting. How much do things shape us? How much do narratives and the worlds we create through stories and intellectual constructs and things shape and change who we are?

Chris Oh, wow. So we have to have another... I've got two things I want to say. Remind me, Vivian. The first thing I want to say is when you were talking about this T.S. Eliot story and about, you know, is the present king of France bald? Do you know what was going through my head? This early episode of The Simpsons when Bart was learning how to play mini golf and Lisa was teaching him and she was trying to get him into a meditative frame of mind by asking him Japanese koans. So she asked him, like, remember this one? She's like, what is the sound of one hand clapping? And he's like, and he just sort of, you know, clapped his own palm. He's like, no, no, no, you don't get it. It's this timeless Japanese koan without answers. He's like, no, no, no, the answer is simple.

Anyway. The second thought, we're just completely sidetracked, we won't go into this here, but after this lecture, I actually went out to a small, quaint, wonderful English village and had an extended afternoon tea with my doctoral supervisor, Vivian Xu, who is kind of one of the, she's retired now, but she was, you know, absolute architect of how Western political science looks at the politics of China. And this is very much, you know, her whole intellectual project is around, you know, how do we, it's sort of, it's like trying to get beyond relativity and more recognizing that there is something real about the context of our lives that to a large extent, you know, we never, we just can't possibly develop complete self-awareness of. gives it shape that is then distinctive to kind of the environment in which we had to perform that necessary task. And so can you take that? Boy, we are really off on it. It's interesting.

Scott So you think about China, right? And so there's this sort of classic kind of Western liberal democratic argument, free markets, free people, that if you give people... You can cultivate some of those market forces with an autocracy. We tend to think that those things are in such contradiction because we've seen them develop in relative... What if people don't see the value in political freedom but do like the benefits of capitalism?

Chris That's an interesting possibility. I guess I'll go one step further down this dark winding path. My China guru, Vivian, We take it one step further and say, you know, so in a kind of liberal democratic world, humanity, the person, the actor is kind of the purpose of history. I mean, history is the story, is his story, is the story of us. And so all of the purposes of society are about us, about our flourishing, if you will. Whereas in archaic China, in ancient China, it was a much more cosmological view of the world, that the purpose was for Earth to be in kind of symbiosis with heaven. to be a reflection of heaven, of the order and harmony of heaven. And that informed the ritual, and that informed the role, and that informed the policies of the emperor. And so Vivian would argue that, not saying that President Xi Jinping thinks like that now, but that that legacy, which today is still in ways that are completely unconscious, In the structure and the syntax of the language and in the shape of the rituals and in the fact that why do the Chinese obsess about looking a certain way and writing these long and impenetrable speeches and all of that? She has this wonderful metaphor, which I'm now going to steal, but I'm crediting it to her, so it's fine.

So Vivian, she plays the harp. She's a harpist. And she said, so what you can do on a harp, if you play a chord, say like two strings, really, really strongly, and that chord sounds out, if you then still those two strings, you quiet those two strings, you still hear the note because all the other strings are vibrating in sympathetic resonance. And so that's her metaphor for how our present way of seeing the world and our politics reflect ancient ideas.

Scott I would say this about Marxism. You look at Marx and Engels, and they were atheists, angry at God, and they kind of make a sort of godless Christian vision because there's a kingdom of God. And Jesus says the kingdom's already, it's not yet. It's this beginning revolution that's happening, and then we'll bring the end to history, and the lion will lay down with the lamb. And you see this in Marxism, right? It's already not yet, and the further the kingdom develops, then you have this utopian thing where every— But it's drawing upon these sort of ancient things. Yeah, it takes a kind of Judeo-Christian teleology, and it's an apocalyptic worldview without God, right? And you couldn't—I would argue, without the Judeo-Christian tradition, Marxism would be impossible. Not that you can't transplant it out of that tradition. But it wouldn't develop outside of that sort of biblical story of a kind of view of history that's not cyclical, but teleological.

Chris Right, right. That's really interesting. And so, I mean, so all of this, so to bring this back to the debate I was having on Tuesday, you know, I get there is this kind of meta question about how do we begin to kind of put trajectory on humanity? And is that even a doable thing to know, are we on the right path? Are we on the right track? And it's also interesting that, of course, right now, in an unreflective way, we're all doing this. Our present-day politics and business leadership, social leadership is all... Within a narrative of things are going great or things are headed in the wrong direction. I remember, so I kind of closed the argument against the notion we were on the right track with more personal insults at myself. So the proposition looks at the opposition as being cynical. Why are you so cynical? Why do you have no faith in humanity's ability to address these challenges? And the opposition, you know, kind of... Looks across the debating table as colleagues on the other sides of the argument and just kind of like wonders like what fantasy land did you people grow up in that you've developed such a naive optimism about like one what humanity's intentions are and two humanity's ability to like overcome obstacles.

Which was obvious in the context of that debate because the proposition had grown up in Canada. And so, you know, every trend looks like a hockey stick. It's just sort of, you know, going in the right direction. I think, you know, and there's a really powerful argument on the other side and sort of the cynical side when you ask, you know, is humanity able to respond to the complexity and the scale of the crises that we've manufactured? Within a domain of kind of, you know, society where the resources to study the problem and to see a problem are almost unlimited. Like the financial sector and the regulation, I mean, you've got as many PhDs as you want, as much money as you need. And so the cynic says, you know, something like the financial crisis is evidence that like, you know, these problems, the reality is that what's happening is that narrow interests are capturing governance and capturing regulatory bodies and pushing society to accept rather than reduce levels of risk because fundamentally, you know,

Yeah, maybe humanity as a whole is going to weather these storms. But again, if you think that inequalities matter, there's every indication that every big storm that hits is going to hit unequally. And especially if we're going to enter into a world of slower growth, right? Like populations got to top out, resources have a finite limit. And so the idea that eventually everyone is going to be lifted starts to be less and less credible. And the argument that, okay, that's it, that's everything. So now it's a distribution game, becomes stronger and stronger. And the cynic says, if that's the case, then we've kind of got to move past a belief in kind of trickle-down, that the benefits will eventually accrue to those who need them. And get more interventionist, which I guess is sort of where the American left is today, to say that why would we wait for those who need it to get what they need? We should just actively be giving it, be prioritizing their needs now. So, yeah. I completely, in summary, I think I completely twisted myself. It sounds like it. In that debate. Because it's so easy when you want to...

When you want to argue that humanity is on the wrong track, it is so easy to look at the liberal democracies of the world today as – these are actually the words that I used – decadent, inward-looking, pot-smoking places that are so self-satisfied with their levels of development that they don't even recognize how backwards they're becoming. Drop the mic.

Scott So, I preached this sermon on Sunday about hope, and one of the things I was saying was that pessimism and optimism are sort of psychological, and they both can be reality-resistant, right? Because the pessimist doesn't want to create false optimism and have their expectations crushed, so they sort of see through one set of lenses. The optimist, you know... And I think that that, that to me is, is, is, is, I mean, this is, you know, Viktor Frankl, man's search for meaning, you know, like so much of, of, of what kept people alive in the concentration camps was existential kind of hope. And I think that hope is a powerful thing because I think it, again, it, it, it, it allows you to, to. To dream and to have an enlightened imagination and yet also, again, not minimize the tragic nature of the human condition, which so often is before us.

Chris So that, I think that's a brilliant kind of synthesis note to end on. And I wonder too, so I wonder, because it has been a really kind of... Rocky, few years, you know, in many places around the world. And I wonder if that's going to be the, you know, not the middle, I don't know if it's the middle-topia, but I wonder if that's where the conversation is going to start going in a lot of societies, is a recognition that, you know, we're kind of divided between optimism and pessimism, and both... Both dissatisfy in ways. What we really need to do, the unifying conversation is around hope and how do we kind of come together and build together because we recognize that fears and anxieties are justified and we also recognize that we have immense resources and potential. To, you know, address them seriously and not to create a utopia in which there's just no more problems, but to

create a different and more beautiful world. And if that's a realistic possibility, then surely that should be what we can work toward. Amen to that. Dude, dude, you should have been there on Tuesday. That'd be awesome. We might have to do this together.

Scott That would be fun. We could each play like two different people on each side.

Chris Yeah, with two people, that's totally sweet. Like kind of like round one, I argue for, and then you argue against, and then we flip it.

Scott Right, so we'd each play like a couple people on each side.

Chris That would be fun. So maybe to wrap up in terms of like the... So there was kind of two levels of learning in that exercise. One was the content, and it's just fascinating to... To look at the different arguments and kind of be torn by the rhetorical strength of both optimism and pessimism about the path that humanity is on. But two was about this idea that we actually need a double vision right now. We need to develop the capacity to sort of see both sides and hold them because that's sort of the truest frame of looking at things.

Scott It's Hegel, man. Contradiction. The truth is in the contradiction. The contradiction's not a problem.

Chris But then, so thank you, Hegel, we'll quote him, show notes. Who's this Hegel guy? I've heard this name before. It's all about the Hegel, baby. But, you know, the challenge with Hegel is what he doesn't, I don't know if he gets into it, because I haven't memorized it like you, but it seems to me that at the same time, it's probably, it's practically not possible to hold the contradiction. And so the best we can practically do is to consciously shift perspectives. And kind of develop that muscle to see one, and then the other, and then the one again.

Scott Yeah, yeah. Hegel has this quote in The Phenomenology of Spirit, where he says, I think he says, the truth is the whole. And he basically, you know, Adorno responding to that has this line, I forget which book it is in, but he says, you know, the whole is the lie. But for Hegel, you know, for Hegel, though, the whole is only seen through the particular, right? Like, there's no universal outside of the particular, right? So you can only, there's no view from nowhere, right? So our finite capacity to see the whole is only, you can see parts of it at once. So the universal isn't an end around around particularity. It's not that particularity is all there is, but because there's a greater whole— You can only know the universal through many particulars.

Chris Yeah, absolutely. And kind of piece it together and reflect. Yeah, no, exactly. Amen. Dude, so I feel like that was good work for both of us. Absolutely. Having that conversation, looking at both sides, and I'd love to know what our listeners thought.

Scott Yeah, me too. Send us an email, everybody.

Chris Always mind-blowing, my friend.

Scott Ditto.