The Stephen Hicks Interview

Interviewer John Anderson in Australia, on June 18, 2020, interviewed Stephen Hicks for 58:13 minutes, and the conversation is labeled, Stephen Hicks: Postmodernism Abd Nazis. I took notes on the conversation and then respond to these remarks, below. John Anderson (J): Welcome to Australia. Today we would like you to explain postmodernism and free speech. We both come from British Commonwealth nations and are the lucky recipients of a lot of good ideas producing free societies. Do we now understand that history well enough to preserve it? (My addition: this classical British political and cultural tradition) Stephen Hicks (S): We live in great times and if problems arise, we can solve them, but we have fallen down by not providing historical lessons and training for the next generation. My response: Each generation needs to learn its people's tradition and culture lest they lose the level of civilization transmitted through education and upbringing, passed on from generation to generation. Our professors, progressives, elitists and intellectuals have so devalued the concepts of the advantages to studying history, that the young are now ignorant of important lessons already learned in the near-term past. S: The conservatives, the liberals and the libertarians were complacent in the 90s when they won the Cold War. We have won and democracy and our way of life is now safe, but they mistakenly underestimated the craftiness of the Left, that in the 90s and early 2000s worked hard to restrategize, got out their cultural and political message so well that they are now taking over the West. The conservatives are not fighting back. My response: the rest of us were caught off guard. Perhaps Peterson, Hicks, Prager and Levin can lead a united conservative counter-revolution to save America and the West. J: Why is this cultural battle raging so feverishly especially in the English-speaking world? S: The West is rich, and can afford the best minds, so they congregate here. The disasters of Communism and National Socialism were European happening, so the fallout from that is still being argued over. And the English tolerate eccentrics and encourage the exchange of free ideas and public debate. J: Then why is it that free speech is now suppressed at universities so monochrome in their views? Why are only support for postmodernism and identity politics tolerated in the universities? S: During the Enlightenment supporters of democratic republicanism held forth that they could solve problems. They were confident about reason, judgment and objectivity. But skepticism and pessimism slowly gained a foothold during the modern age, and by the 1950s, philosophers were very skeptical and pessimistic. We cannot observe the world and get it correctly. We are trapped in a subjective reality. Our ideas, concepts and theories are arbitrary, socially subjective constructs. Professors argued that reason is not capable, so what we must do to formulate our beliefs and values, we must go for irrational sources. Now, free speech is the theory that individuals need it to think for themselves and have space to work it out for themselves. If we do not value individuals (as postmodernists do not--Ed adds), then society will not train them to think. No time is given to new dialogue and the exchange of ideas between different people, Free speech facilitates dialogue, contesting and coopering by the process of exchanging points of view. The postmodernist deny that people are individuals, seeking personal truth and values. People are just things molded in the social process. They are just vehicles for competing social forces contesting against each other. My response: Hicks is spot on in insisting that there is no individuality without free speech, free thought and personal agency. There is no democracy without smart, individuated voters, thinking for themselves. This reveals how sinister and totalitarian the postmodernist Left actually is. Postmodernists and Marxist regard humans as just herd creatures, other-determined by the genetic and social forces that construct them. Their reason and their will is weak, or so deficient as to be almost without impact or depth. S: In the Enlightenment, it was believed that, under, democratic-republicanism, citizens could solve most problems. With reason, objectivity and judgment, when applied, worked. What is now prevalent in university grew out of skeptical, pessimistic outlooks that built slowly during the age of modernism, until by the 1950s, thinkers were in a very skeptical, very pessimistic frame of mind: we can't observe the world and get it correctly. We are trapped in subjective reality. Our ideas, concepts and theories are arbitrary, subjective social constructs. J: Is this why Jonathan Haidt asserts that we are categorizing people as the good people versus the bad people. S: That is the values aspect of a wider war in the culture. It is occurring in religious, scientific and political arenas too, cultural quarreling. The social constructionists see no hope for peaceful, dialogued, resolution of contesting rival groups. J: American history depicts its political system set up to advocate freedom, yet Hamilton worried about saving the dignity of the individual while constraining mob rule and chaos. My response: the points made here by Hicks and Anderson both seem reasonable. S: Social psychology shows that rational, decent, commonsensical persons can lose it in a mob. People are not rational and moral when hooked up with mob rule. This is horizontal conformity, and people engage in vertical conformity by ceding self-rule to government hierarchies and government authority figures. My response: this point was new for me. Hicks identifies that people can conform horizontally in the herd, as well as vertically as cogs in hierarchies, such as government institutions. Great insight. J: The postmodernist victim groups are not part of a classical socialist universalism. The ideas was to lift all up but under this new regime of group identity politics, a new aristocracy is arising based on victimhood. The older Left was universalistic. S: This universalist outlook was abandoned in the 1960s. People used to believe in a single human nature. Now the Marxists and postmodernists believe in human natures, plural and multiple. My response: It occurred to me that Hicks, though he does not directly connect the two in this interview, is arguing that, under the ideal of the sovereign individual, a citizen in a democratic/republican polity, is a a universalist claim about human nature, and the human condition. It is a grand narrative. If one is modernist, and rational and Western, one believes in individualism and the ideas of one common human nature shared by all humans for all time. There can be no championing individualism without belief in an accompanying shared human nature. The postmodernists believe in multiple human natures so that people is utterly socially constructed, without will or agency, and their plural human natures render them easily and endlessly malleable, to be reprogrammed and socially constructed into whatever persons that the elite of the polity that they reside in, deem to be their nature. There is no free will, and all is determined by the social order. All live in groups, and their group will dictate what they feel and believe. The role and persona assumed are provided by the determinists ruling the nation and community. Because people are the willess products of their social and political upbringing, they are different from people in other historical epochs. We cannot learn from history because nothing in human nature is. constant over time. Sadly, because postmodernists do not recognize what others went through in the past, it is wrongly concluded that we cannot learn from history and the experiences of our ancestors, lest we commit the same foolish errors generation after generation. S: Leftist-driven resentment and revenge-seeking leads them to tear down the rich and the powerful. Where Leftists are sensible and reasonable, they admit that socialism fails always, and reposition themselves becoming market liberals. With these Leftists abandoning the Marxist cause, that leaves only the resenters who seek to tear down society. These resenters aim to tear down society and use the dispossessed as pawns. People that are failures end up being resentful and envying the successful. My response: I am convinced that none are born inferior to others, and none are doomed to fail. All differ in their level of ability and intelligence, but the will to win, advance and self-realize trumps natural talent every time if the individual but believes in herself, and gets after victory and achievement. She is expected to fail, perhaps several times, but her will to overcome must drive her to keep trying, until she masters her faults and shortcomings. There is no room for resentment, envy, and revenge for her because the powerful and successful are who she will be joining. She would never stoop to finding refuge in resentment politics. S: Resenters are clever at rationalizing their bad ideology. The Left did not abandon disproven, discredited Marxism, but doubled-down renaming it the Frankfurt School, deconstructionism, postmodernism. My response: the Marxists were never discredited to the degree that the Nazis were, and that was a dangerous, grave mistake. J: The Leftist did not learn from history. S: History is irrelevant claim the dismissive skeptics and relativists: we cannot learn from history, for this generation is unique. But postmodernists will use history tactically to their advantage. Conservatives refute such dismissiveness, for history and experience matter today. Nietzsche influenced the Nazis and he was the most important philosopher in the 20th century. Educated Nazis loved Nietzsche. Nietzsche's conflict model, his irrationalist understanding of human beings deeply appealed to the Nazis. We become our best not by thinking or objectively reasoning (reasoning is a weak capacity). Instead, humans are deeply instinctive, and our job is to channel our instincts and drives for the best, creative outcome comes from that. Master races prey on others that are weak prey and slaves to be conquered and used. My response: Hicks and Jordan Peterson disagree as to how culpable is Nietzsche for his popularity among the Nazis. Is he guilty and Hicks believes, or is Peterson correct in complaining that the misinterpreting of Nietzsche's works by his Nazi sister converted Nietzsche's philosophy into something monstrous and unrecognizable, but strongly favored by the Nazis. I do not know, but it might be a bit of both. S: Predator races are to war constantly to get strong. What philosophers write does impact the world. Nietzsche influenced practical politics 20 years after his death. The Alt-right and the Left are in conflict; both are irrationalist, but both are opposed by Classical Liberalism. These liberals urge people to be rational, decent, trade peacefully and practice tolerance. This three-way cultural battle is raging today. My response: Amen. J: We Australians are the repository of classical liberalism and conservativism. We knew that human nature was both good and evil, so we played to our better angels. Still, we are now so government-dependent. We must deal with our human nature, and what we seek to change or how makes us strong or weak. S: Do individuals ha e a powerful capacity for agency (Hicks believes they do.). They run their own lives. People as individualists have this agency capacity so there are moral consequences for their actions, then they are morally responsible, and the leads the need for only small government. Some form of existent democracy is necessary, and it needs individuals to run it. My response: Sound good. S: Postmodernists deny that humans enjoy agency: their illusion of free will is built into them instead by social forces, working on them. There is a linguistic version of this, and each group enjoys a unique grammar, with unique assumptions about how the world works, and groups with competing languages do not understand each other's perspectives, so they compete and clash and was ensues. Or they come from different economic circumstances, so class warfare arrives on the scene because they cannot understand each other, or as rival ethnic groups, tribal warring is their preferred national pastime. They refute the idea of the individual exercising volition, for under Modernism, the individual is morally responsible for his acts. He is self-controlling, but under Marxism, the individual is environmentally determined. This is reinforced in the Sapir-Whorf linguistic hypothesis and under John Dewey's pragmatism. Freud's psychology offered that we are ruled by instincts, that moral reason exists only on the surface. My response: Humans do enjoy free agency. As groupists and group-living, our grammar is comprised mostly of the groups that we hail from. As we maverize, and individual-live, if we do so, then our grammar becomes more our own, unique, eloquent, insightful. Under Modernism, and in reality, humans are morally responsible for their acts, and are increasingly self-controlling as they assert their independence and claim and wield the powers to run their own lives and make their own decisions. The individual is not a blank slate, to be written on, and determined by his group affiliations, his social reality, his biological traits and his family's values. These things do influence him, but, as an individuator, he will meld all this input to serve his will, his purpose, to achieve his vision of the world and his place in it. J: Backers of identity politics deny that we can celebrate in freedom while helping the poor. Victim discrimination and competing rights has become a nightmare. S: in the 60s rights definitions changed. We were granted liberty, life and opportunity to act to do our own thing. Charity for the poor then became what they were entitled to, so it was their right to receive a piece of the social pie. Now we have competing rights between the haves and the have-nots. Young people used to go to college as enthusiastic idealists, vigorous and filled with life drive. But students were introduced to bad philosophy that ruined them. Healthy students are attracted to good philosophy. 1st rate professors did not watch things, and 3rd rate careerists, postmodernists, took over the universities. J: Identity politics is the claim that we cannot celebrate.