https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=aozkTw6EVFQ
So I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about thinking, about its nature and about its relationship to free speech, and its relationship to conflict and disagreement. So let me lay out some propositions and you tell me what you think about them. Okay, so the first proposition has to do with why you should think at all. Now, people will avoid thinking because it is difficult, right? It’s technically complex and demanding. And so there’s reason right there not to engage in it. It’s emotionally challenging, right? Because if you already abide by a certain principle, and then you go at it even in your own imagination, hammer and tongs, and you start to shake the foundation, then, well, that exposes you to cognitive entropy and that produces anxiety, and that’s very well documented in the neuroscience literature. So there’s every reason not to question your own presuppositions on the emotional side. So it’s difficult and it’s emotionally demanding. And then on the social side, if you’re thinking with someone, which basically means that you’re exchanging verbal ideas, then there’s the possibility of eliciting disagreement and the emotional unpleasantness and possible conflict that goes along with that, right? As well as the fact that if you expose yourself to someone who thinks differently than you, they can challenge your presuppositions and make you anxious and leave you bereft of hope. So those are all the reasons you shouldn’t think. And then you might say, well, given all those reasons to not think, why should you think? And the answer to that, the best answer to that I’ve ever seen is implicit in the ideas of Alfred North Whitehead. Whitehead said, and I think this is true from a biological and evolutionary perspective, that we learn to think so that we could allow our inappropriate thoughts or impractical thoughts to die instead of us. So you could think of a thought not so much as a description of the world, but as a virtual, a fragmented virtual avatar. You send it out in an exploratory foray to see if it can withstand any trials. And if it can’t, then you dispense with it. Now, there’s some cost to that, the emotional cost and so forth. But the advantage is you don’t act out the stupid ideas and die. And so I’m laying this out for the listeners and watchers so that they can understand why. Because they might be thinking, well, do you really have to engage in contentious disagreement at the academic level if you’re a thinker? Why can’t everyone just get along? And the answer is, well, some ideas are stupid and impractical, and it’s better to kill those suckers before they make themselves manifest in the world. And in order to do that, you have to be disagreeable and offensive. Now, no more than necessary. Now, I’ve really seen a difference there, for example, between the North Americans and the Brits, because the Brits at their best, their education system teaches them to engage in like blood sport, cognitive combat, and to do that in a very civilized manner. So that they keep the argument within the domain of rationality and abstraction. It doesn’t spill over into interpersonal conflict. And part of what universities were supposed to do was train people to do that, to think critically, to think in a manner that risks disrupting themselves and their interpersonal relationships, without that spilling over into actual conflict and to replace conflict with thought. Now, we seem to be dispensing with that. And interestingly enough, so there’s a bunch of things I want you to comment on. My experience in academia and in the broader political world has been I have never talked to someone who is conservative once and tried to set them up with a potential combatant and had them refuse to participate or refuse to associate with that person. And that has happened to me while trying to set up conversations dozens of times with people on the left. I saw that starting at about 2010 at the University of Toronto. It just sort of crept into the discourse. So, well, so maybe I could get you to comment on the necessity of combat in thought. But then also I’d be interested in your ideas about why this proclivity to cancel seems to be so manifest on the left. You’d expect there to be right-wing, you know, tightly bound right-wing thinkers who were also inclined to cancel and shun. But that hasn’t been how it’s been manifesting itself, at least for the last 15 years. Well, the intellectual combat is essential at the university level. In fact, the very etymology of the word university talks about or is based on the unification of thought. It doesn’t mean the unanimity of thought. It means that there has been a process in place, by the way, I agree with you, exemplified by British institutions and British scholars on the left and right toward whatever capital T truth is. And in American institutions, especially since the 1940s and accelerating in the 70s, there’s basically the absence of that. In fact, the opposite of that. So that if you go in and you say that I want to do intellectual combat, you know, somehow you’re committing some grave sin inside the American Academy. But it’s essential because that’s where we refine our own positions. And I’ll just use an example of what think tanks do just to go back to that question. The think tank at its height, I would argue, is one where, of course, it’s going to have a particular set of positions that it’s taking publicly. But the process of arriving at those positions internally is one where there is, as I like to call it here at the Heritage Foundation, creative conflict. And in my nearly two years here and almost every meeting that I have with our policy people, I ask them, well, what would the competing, the alternative position be and what case would we make for that? What evidence would we marshal for that? Because, first of all, we need to question our assumptions. But secondly, given that the reason we do research at Heritage is, in fact, to effect change in public policy, we ought to be better prepared for the attacks that will come. But to your second question, very related, which is why it is that on the political left there is this absence of that kind of conflict, I think it’s because ultimately the most radical part of leftism is one that undermines truth very actively. They’ve sort of lost, as Yeats would say in his famous poem, they’ve lost the center. There’s nothing cohering their mode of thought. And if you look at what’s going on in the political right, something that you’ve been talking about and researching more in recent years, there’s a very healthy, sometimes kind of fractious debate that’s going on about particular policies, about the relationship between the individual and the state. Those can be a little frustrating sometimes in terms of political outcomes, but on the intellectual level, they are important and they speak to the vitality, the intellectual vitality of the political right right now. So we did some research in 2016 looking at predictors of politically correct authoritarianism. First of all, we did a factor analytics study that showed that there was clearly a set of ideas that were associated with one another that you could identify as politically correct authoritarianism. So it wasn’t just some right wing delusion that that coherent system of ideas existed. And then we looked and we did that by asking a very large number of participants, a very large number of political questions and then subjecting them to statistical analysis so that we could see which opinions clumped together and how. And so there was a liberal contingent of ideas and a conservative contingent and authoritarian left wing contingent. And so then we looked at what predicted that. And the best predictor was low verbal intelligence. And I think the reason for that was that the radical leftists basically offer a unidimensional solution to a very complex problem, which is that all human motivation can be reduced to power, which is technically incorrect and preposterous and also an extremely harmful, what would you call it, a harmful insistence. But it’s very easy to understand and it does provide for universal explanatory power. And then, but we also found that the personality trait agreeableness was also a predictor and agreeableness is associated with compassion. And the thing is, you know, if you engage in the blood sport of critical thinking, you do risk hurting other people’s feelings, right? At least in the moment. Now, there might be long term advantage to that for both players, as there often is when you settle a fractious issue, say between wife and husband or between family members, there’s some combat that’s required to set things straight. And then you get an interlude of peace afterward. It might also be that the radical leftists are also temperamentally predisposed to avoid conflict, because as they do say themselves, they prioritize compassion above all. In fact, they make it a universal virtue, let’s say, and they don’t understand the necessity of having to at least, however irregularly, tolerate periods of emotional discomfort to set things straight. So, you know, I’ve been trying to puzzle out. I mean, liberals, they don’t like borders because they’re high in openness, they’re creative and they’re low in orderliness. So they don’t necessarily find satisfaction in keeping things in their proper place. So that’s part of the reason they have a hard time drawing borders and distinctions, you know. It’s why the moderate leftists, I think, have a hard time contending with the radicals. But then there’s also this proclivity to prioritize emotional comfort over everything else, even in the moment. And that isn’t commensurate with healthy debate of the discriminatory kind that has to occur if you’re going to refine your ideas. You know, and then that does expose people in the way that you already said, you know, if you formulate policy and you don’t hash, hack the hell out of it in intramural debate within your own institution and you launch those ideas out there in the world, they’re going to get torn into shreds. You bloody well better be your own worst enemy when you’re thinking so that you’re well protected against what the actual world, social and natural, is going to throw at you. Another reason to think. Well, it is. And two things come to mind, at least initially. The first is, I think, as I listened to the last part of what you said in reference to public policy, I think one of the frustrations that Americans, presumably Canadians and Brits and many people around the world have with politics is the absence of what they perceive to be a real debate, right? And this is true on the political right. There’s a frustration among grassroots activists who are conservatives in the United States about the absence of a real debate, whether it be about specific policy issues or even about the sort of social, economic, cultural diagnosis of the Malays that has beset the Western world. People, especially younger voters who have a certain bias increasingly towards center-right politics, are looking for those men or women who are candidates for elective office who are at least asking the right questions, even if they may themselves decide that they disagree with that person’s answer. They just want the questions asked. And as we then focus on public policy, I don’t know how public policy organizations can be prepared for the media that their scholars do, the testimonies, say, for example, that our scholars at Heritage do without having just a vibrant internal process of disagreement. And I think the key thing to home in on is that disagreement doesn’t have to be disagreeable. It may, and if it does, it may get into the zone of hurting people’s feelings. But as I’ve mentioned to more than one student in my teaching career, I don’t mean this to be offensive, but I care a lot less about your feelings than I do about your pursuit of truth.