Saving the Humanities | Stephen Blackwood | EP 188

52m read

·Nov 7, 2024

The national socialist was it was a very largely technological regime. You know nuclear war is the creation of technology. You know the gene modifying technology, biowarfare, these are all things that are either there or almost there, with the capacity to wreak unimaginable suffering on the entire planet because of the technology. That's not to say that technology is bad; it is to say rather that it must take its place relative to a higher order series of conversations. What I absolutely want to insist on is that those higher order conversations, they're not mere intuitions; they're not mere, you know, speculative "oh we can just kind of, you know, consult the entrails of a goose" or something. They're also not mere expressions of the arbitrary desire for power. Because that's exactly the central animating spirit. That isn't why you built RAWs; that isn't why you're trying to build Ralston College. It isn't to fulfill your own desire for power. That's not a good motivation, it's not pleasing, it doesn't last, it's not enriching. It's what people turn to when they're bitter and cynical.

[Music]

Hello everyone, I'm pleased to have with me today Dr. Stephen Blackwood, who's the founding president of Ralston College, a newly founded university in Savannah, Georgia. Dr. Blackwood was one of the founders of Saint George's Youth Net, an educational mentoring program for inner city youth in the North End district of Halifax, Nova Scotia, and was subsequently a teaching fellow in the foundation year program at the University of King's College, which is one of Canada's finest undergraduate institutions. Blackwood hosted and moderated a conversation between Sir Roger Scruton and I at Cambridge University in November of 2018, and moderated the debate "Happiness: Capitalism versus Marxism" between Slavoj Žižek and I on April 19, 2019. Dr. Blackwood lectures and specializes in the history of philosophy, especially Boethius. He also hosts the Ralston College podcast, which has featured guests including Douglas Murray, the physicist Freeman Dyson, Andrew Doyle, the online satirist and author, and Theodore Dell Rempel, who wrote "Our Culture: What's Left of It," among many other books. Oxford University Press published his book "The Consolation of Boethius: As Poetic Liturgy" in 2015.

Welcome, Dr. Blackwood. Stephen, it's really good to see you. Thanks for agreeing to talk to me today.

Thanks for having me, and Jordan, it's great to see you again. I think the last time we—yeah, I think the last time we actually saw each other, I believe was during the debate with Slavoj Žižek; is that correct?

That is right. I think that is right, yeah. So it's about two years ago. So, maybe I could ask you first of all about the inner city youth program in the North End of Halifax. I don't know that story, so that might be a nice place to start.

Well, I grew up in Eastern Canada—in a place that you would know but perhaps not all of your listeners know, in Prince Edward Island—in a sort of pastoral, quiet, sleepy, very rural place, and a small family farm in a huge—well, comparatively by historic standards, a huge family—seven younger brothers and two younger sisters, my parents—the milk cow. I don't want to paint too idyllic a picture; everyone knows family life and farm life has all kinds of ups and downs. But the point I'm trying to make is that I had a very kind of intensely wonderful, rich, and very actively busy childhood. It set me up in many respects for the discovery of philosophy when I went to college, and I had the immeasurable gift of meeting some teachers who just opened worlds to me. I mean, you know what a teacher can do and be, having had them yourself and having been one for so many people.

I really fell in love with trying to think deeply about, you know, fundamental matters, and not that I was pretty good at it by any means, but just that it was eye-opening for me to see that things I had perhaps intuited in my childhood about the nature of things—in some deep sense, we all have these intuitions, whether through nature or music or love or family life or whatever—that there were ways of thinking about those things. I spent quite a long time with some wonderful teachers, particularly in the ancient Greek and Latin, and then medieval tradition, thinking about things, and particularly about the nature of the human individual and what it really is—what its realization is.

Anyway, I mentioned all that because when I came to the end of my master’s degree, I’d gone straight through doing a lot of thinking work in a wonderful community. It needs to be said, I just had kind of, in a way, had my fill of ideas. I had kind of tapped out; I had gone as far as I could in the theoretical at that point, and I needed to re-engage in the—not I wouldn't say the real world, but in the more— you know, the more the world of activity and action. I had a dear friend and mentor of mine named Gary Thorne, who was the priest at an inner-city parish called Saint George's Church in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and he had been, with others—including one of my sisters—working in the inner city thinking about which was, I should say, a very rough and highly dysfunctional place, the North End of Halifax, that is or was—and in some respects still is—but not least because of an absolutely catastrophic civic decision.

There was a place in Halifax called Africville, a Black community that, though perhaps was not entirely up to contemporary standards in terms of technology and things, was a vibrant place. Duke Ellington had played there; it was a flourishing community. Anyway, the city wanted to build a new bridge, and part of the foundations of the bridge they wanted to put in Africville. So at least that's the story I've understood from my own reading about it. They uprooted this entire very vibrant community out of the place that had been called Africville and resettled them into pretty dismal inner-city housing in the North End, and that was not by any means, I think, the only factor but a very significant moment in the devastation of a community.

When I was there in the late '90s into the early 2000s, the mid-'90s to early 2000s, there were very many serious problems from drug and alcohol abuse to prostitution, devastatedly broken families. My friend Gary Thorne and others had been thinking about what modest—you know, one doesn’t think one can solve these really very serious problems. You know, simply walk out and solve them; they're really hard—but what could the parish, that I say this community, do that might be meaningful? So I was with a group of people involved in setting up a small, very small, this is a small community, but small youth mentoring and life skills program called Saint George's Youth Net. The idea was to be a kind of network that would help pick these children up when they fell and to give them—well, our observation, Father Thorne’s observation, had been over many years that if you wait until someone has already fallen through the cracks, it’s in many respects—and this is a terrible thing to say, I know—but in many respects too late. It's very hard to reach people—not that it's impossible; I believe in redemption; I believe in the whole possibility of things being turned around, right down to the most—you know, tiniest fibers of my being. But the point is that it is very, very hard to do that with someone who’s 16 or 17 or 18 already fallen out of—you know, dropped out of school or had a baby or whatever.

So we thought about ways of what we could do to expand the horizons of these children and youth of all ages—really, but starting with them as young as school age—and working with them. I won’t go on at length about this but what I learned was a couple of things that are still really, really with me today. The first is that human realization of the individual has to come down at a very fundamental level to the individual. Like no one else can live your life for you. You know, no one else can kind of come in and just do it for you. That would deny all of the agency that is at the heart of human fulfillment, and the driving force of this meanness of life has to come from me. In a way, I think that's a standpoint that, at some loose level, people would call the political right, seems to understand that. You know, there has to be agency; it's fundamental. And yet that is a totally incomplete standpoint at the same time, because we don’t simply throw children out into the woods and say, "All right, come back when you’re fully formed, you know, writing books and playing the flute and fully able to take on the complexities of life."

One of the things that’s so striking to me is that as people have ability, one of the things they will throw all of themselves into is the raising of their children. And so damn well they should. My wife and I have not been blessed with children, unfortunately, but I, as the eldest of a big family and having observed my friends and many others—they will just give everything they can to carefully tend to this, to the development of each individual. They're not all the same; even in a single family, you can only have two children or three, and they can be very different as day and night, and yet they will give everything they can to these. And so well they should.

But what this points to, I think, is a really fundamental question: what are the conditions—the external conditions—for human realization? What we found with these beautiful, often, you know, children in very, very broken circumstances is that, on the one hand, we had to have high expectations for them and their agency. We had to insist that they'd be there on time, that they treat others with respect, that they be attentive, and to anything less was to betray their own dignity and potential—what they could become. And yet, on the other hand, we found that we had to move heaven and earth to make those opportunities possible for them. We would go around in the mornings and pick them up at their home because they didn't have people who would get them there on time, and we would make various other kinds of, let’s say, accommodations to make things accessible for them.

And lastly, I will simply say that you know it’s not enough just to keep people busy; you have to give them ways that open up their own understanding of themselves. So we took them wilderness camping. Many of these were kids who'd never been outside of inner-city Halifax. We took them to Cape Shadnecto, a beautiful park on the Bay of Fundy, and spent three days, you know, hiking through unbelievably beautiful terrain. We had music programs, and fine art programs. And later on, they were teaching them Latin after I left.

The point is that I don't overestimate what good we did for anyone, but insofar as we did any good for them, I think it was in believing that helping them believe that they mattered—that they mattered at the highest plane of existence—that they were—it was not just enough to learn technical skills, as important as those are, or to note that you needed to come on time to have a chance in life, but that you were made. The highest and best things there are were made for you.

So anyway, I've gone on rather long, but that was an important part of life. I came to see things that are still grounded. It's an interesting conclusion to draw from that kind of work because the latter part of that in particular was spoken like a true believer in the humanities, and I suppose we can transition our conversation to that. I mean, the first thing I’d like to ask you, though, before we do that is you grew up in this rural community; you went off to college. What sparked your interest in philosophy? Were your parents educated? I mean, how did you come by the interests that you have?

Well, I think it would be so interesting when you think about childhood and what really is formative. You know, you don't make a kid a philosopher by reading him Aristotle at six. My upbringing in my parents and my siblings were unbelievably important to my sense of the world, to my sense of what a human individual is, to my sense of what's good, my sense of the possibilities of redemption, and so on and so forth.

So, I would say in a very deep way, my earlier childhood opened me up to be able to then later think about things in a more abstract or philosophical register. But you know, philosophy doesn't exist in a vacuum. I mean, it's not for no reason that, you know, Plato and Aristotle are after Homer, and the things that you can only really think about are things that you already in some sense intuit. You don’t just sort of abstractly go off and discover things; the deepest thinking is about you have to already have them in some form.

You know, you have a sense of, well, you could take anything. You can take the difficulty of life or the beauty of a sonnet or the beauty of nature or the horribleness of suffering, and it's very hard to think about these things in the abstract if you've never suffered and never seen suffering. Of course, most human beings at some point do in pretty serious ways. But the point is that one of the things I think we absolutely need to think about very seriously as a society, and as parents and as educators and so on and so forth, is what are the deep forms—the deep things that shape an individual in such a way as to open up that horizon later in life?

You know, I know you've done a lot of work on early childhood development and reflected at length on things like play in Piaget and others. Everything in its own time in a way that is right for the stage of development. But what I'm saying is that I had some very deeply formative encounters with things that I think are of a very, and I think these are not exclusive to me, they're universal human realities, but I had the privilege of encountering some of them in my youth in a way that then when I went to college.

I went to this place called King’s College, founded in 1789 by loyalists who went north from New York at the time of the American Revolution from an earlier university in New York called King’s College, which at the time of the revolution was renamed, or after just after then renamed Columbia. But the loyalists went to a more northern colony. At that time, of course, this is all pre-Canada, and they set up King’s College. And King's had been failing after it relocated to Halifax in the early '70s, and teachers of mine founded a place called—or a program called the Foundation Year Program.

And my son took that as well.

Oh, that’s right, yeah. So tell us about that.

Well, it is really just a crash course introduction to principally the history of Western culture—not exclusively Western—but going back to very, very, very deep roots from Mesopotamia up through the ancient Greeks, the medievals, the renaissance, the age of enlightenment, and the contemporary world. You’d simply read and think and hear lectures about and discuss books. That wasn’t the kind of introduction to those things. And then I realized that the teachers who set up that program were in the classics department at Dalhousie University—some magnificent teachers.

And I spent then spent the next three years doing a bachelor’s in classics and then a master’s there. But that classics department, I should add, was particularly strong in the philosophical, let’s say, the big ideas that were moving in that period—not that learning languages and things didn’t matter, but they were particularly strong in those careful readings of texts that really can change your life if you attend to them.

So, in my early days of my undergraduate degree, I encountered people who were reading these texts and saying things about them that enabled me to understand the things that I had perhaps intuited when I was younger in a more self-conscious, rationally universal frame, which is of course philosophy.

I’ve been thinking. Well, you’ve been talking about something that I’ve been writing about, and I’ve been working on this for a long time. So I'm a behavioral psychologist. And so behavioral psychologists are eminently practical; we tend to break things down to the smallest applicable unit of action. Right? So if you're trying to help someone move somewhere better, well, you want to figure out what better is, but then you want to decompose that into actions that are likely to be undertaken. And those might be very, very small actions.

And I've been thinking about the question of the meaning of life, and the first objection, I suppose, that arose in my mind was an objection to the question itself, because there might not be a meaning in life. There are places where people derive meaning, and you can list them; and it's useful practically if people are thinking about how to organize their life if they're unhappy and they want to know how things might be better. I mean, my observation—and obviously not only mine—is that people generally need to have a career or a job to keep the wolf from the door but also to engage them productively with others, which is a primary source of meaning for conscientious people and for creative people alike.

You need to pursue your education to flesh out your intellectual capacity. You have to take care of your health, physical and mental. You need an intimate relationship. You need a family. You need friends. You need intelligent use of your leisure time. You have to regulate your susceptibility to the temptations that might lead you astray—drugs and alcohol and perhaps pornography and those sorts of things. But then there is a core to all of that around which these more practical endeavors arrange themselves, and that's something like attention to the spiritual or the philosophical domain or the religious domain. I think you can, in some sense, put all those together, and that might be, well, it might be that the attempt to answer explicitly—or at least to address the question of, well, what is all of that practical life in service of?

And you said, for example, that when you were working with the inner city kids in Halifax, you were trying to help them realize that they were meant for the higher things and vice versa. Someone might ask, well, why bother with that when you can just bother with the skills? And it seems to me that the answer is something like, well, we all have to make decisions about how we're going to behave in life and how we're going to act ethically. And if you help people understand their relationship to what’s ultimately noble, then you can help them fortify their resolution to do good in the world instead of to do harm. It seems to me that we’re always deciding with every decision that we make whether we’re going to do good or do harm by action or by inaction, and whether we should do good or harm or nothing at all.

I think it depends to some degree on who we think we are and what we’re capable of. It seems to me that the humanities, when they’re properly taught, are the study of who we could be, each of us as individuals. We need to know that because otherwise we’ll be much less than we are, and that’s not a trivial problem. It’s a cataclysmic problem, and I also think that people pine away in the absence of that.

I mean, you sent some questions that we could cover, and one of them was, well, you said topics that might be relevant include our historic, cultural, spiritual, civilizational crisis. What is its root? For example, the idea that there is no truth but only power, and the vast longing, hunger of our moment. You said, I think the woke phenomenon is at least in many cases an index of that hunger, although it miserably fails to satisfy this intrinsically human desire for transcendent purpose.

And so to me, the universities are a key element in the conversation across the generations about just exactly what a human being is. And that's something that—it's not some abstract philosophical—it’s not merely some abstract philosophical concern; it's the central issue that determines how you make all the decisions in your life.

So I think that's completely right. I'll say two things just quickly. The first is that my father's a medical doctor, and he worked in the ER for many, many years and has seen many people die. He's remarked to me that no one on their death bed looks back and says, "Gosh, I wish I'd spent more time at the office," or "I wish I'd accumulated more riches for myself."

And so I really do think you're right to say that there is nothing more important than how we understand ourselves. I mean, your human life can't be lived for some other end. I mean, you can do all kinds of things for certain ends. You might work hard to get a qualification in order to get a job in order to make money in order to provide a home for your family, but at a certain point it stops, and it stops. It's not for something else; it's for the lives of these people that I am living, that my life, and for the lives of the people that I am seeking to live in relation to. Those are then not for something else.

The point is that our self-understanding—even you can even look at this, I think, Jordan, from an evolutionary standpoint. I mean, human beings are evolved as creatures that are self-conscious; they are self-understanding; they have self-regard. And this is, you may think that all of the ways in which they regard themselves or the things in relation to which they understand themselves, whether it's truth or beauty or purpose, you may say all those things are just constructs of the will to power, which of course is what, you know, that the dominant nihilism would have us believe, and which I do not accept, which I think we can show to be wrong very clearly, rationally, philosophically.

However, even if you think they are constructs, you still do not escape the fact that human beings are evolved in this way such that their how they understand themselves is absolutely fundamental to their nature. Like that is what we are as an evolved species. And so any culture that does not enable human beings to understand themselves in a way that they find to be richly meaningful—and I’m not saying meaning is just a construct—but if it does not do that at the end of the day, it has failed its fundamental test.

Yes, yes. Okay, so now let's look after this power idea. So you seem to agree with something that I've also concluded, that what's at the root of our current cultural malaise is this idea that human social institutions—and then also by implication primary individual motivation—that human institutions are predicated on power. And so the more I've thought about that, the more wrong it seems to me to be.

And I've also been thinking about truth and lies some more. And you know there are those lies that you tell when you just skirt the truth a bit. So there may be the ones that are most easy to get away with and often most effective, but not always, but often most effective, because maybe they work the best. You take a truth and you bend it a little bit, and that's still a lie. But then there are statements that are antithetical to the truth; they're anti-truth lies.

I think that the idea that human social institutions—especially the functional social institutions of the West—that they're predicated on the drive to power, I think that’s an anti-truth. And so let’s see if we can take that apart a little bit. I mean, the first question might be, well, what exactly is the definition of power? Who's making these claims and what's the definition of the power of power, and why are they making the claims? So let's start with who's making the claim that our social institutions are predicated on power.

Well, it does seem to me to be a claim that comes pretty fundamentally out of the academy. I mean one of my constant refrains is that the academy, the university, that is upstream of absolutely everything else—culture, policy, politics, art and architecture, family life, you know, media—just go down through the list. And I think that these narratives or frameworks are proceeding fundamentally out of certain forms of, really, 19th and 20th century philosophical critiques—many of which were important and even necessary and illuminating in their original form—but which have been made into very reductive, totalizing forms of seeing the world.

And so is it reasonable, do you think, to—in my talks about postmodern neo-Marxism, and of course people who are critical of the way I think point out that, well, postmodernism hypothetically is predicated on the idea that all grand narratives are to be questioned, which you would assume would include the grand Marxist narrative, which presumes that the most appropriate way to view human history and human social institutions is by positing the existence of an oppressor class economically in a subordinate class economically—the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. That’s the fundamental analytic lens through which Marxists approach the world—that those who have have because they’ve taken from those who have not, and that the implication there is the fundamental animating principle of our social structures is exploitation for the benefit of the few.

And then, of course, this is my view anyways, when Marxism became untenable ethically as an explicit philosophy in the late 1960s as a consequence of the revelation of the absolute catastrophe that the Maoists and the Stalinists had made of the Soviet Union respectively, there—that postmodernism transformed Marxism into something that was more palatable on the surface but that proclaimed that, well, it wasn’t exactly economics that was exploitation, that was at the root of things; it was just exploitation in general. It was the manifestation of the power drive, let's say, that keeps people who are in positions of power above the rest and who have at their disposal the means of compelling those people to do what they would not do otherwise against their will. That's an expression of power as well.

I mean, do you think there’s something like, am I wrong in that formulation? I mean, I’ve tried to understand this; I'm not trying to be, what would you say, biased or blinkered about it. It’s just that’s the way it looked; it looks like that to me. I mean, people like Derrida and Foucault—they were Marxists to begin with. And isn’t it the case that the notion that our social relations are structured as a consequence of the expression of arbitrary power isn’t that merely a transformation of that initial Marxist presumption? Or am I barking up the wrong tree here?

Well, I would say a few things. First, I’m very far from a scholar of these complicated intellectual movements from the late 18th-through to the century through to the present. But, in my reading, certainly, in the main, there’s in the main, I think you are right about Marx. And again, I’m not a philosopher of Marx, but if you read, for example, the introduction to his critique of Hegel’s philosophy of right, you know he outlines very clearly this dynamic of focusing all of the force of one part of society against another as an essential kind of material dialectic. And that does seem to me to be fundamentally what is, you know, that is the logic of the power alone revolution. I think that is fundamentally what we're facing in the—well, that leads to a war of all against all, of course, but it certainly leads to identity politics warfare and the reductions of an individual to wherever they can be usefully mobilized in a battle of one part of A against another.

But I would also say about Marx—and again, just to think of the new—as you know, when you get into studying complicated things you always feel you must endlessly qualify what you don't know. There's a huge amount I don't know about Marx, but I also know that he says that religion does not make man; man makes religion. At some very fundamental level, there appears to be, whether in Marx or proceeding out of his interpreters, a wholesale negation or rejection of the idea that there is any abiding metaphysical or transcendent reality.

Well, he—and Marx also points out very clearly that—and this is a key element of Marx's thought—that social structures structure individuals; individual consciousness, and it's not that individual consciousness structures social structures. So it's the group imposing its nature on the individual rather than the group being led by the individual. And that's a profoundly anti-Enlightenment and I would say anti-Judeo-Christian proposition. And certainly something—and then you said something else that was interesting, you know, you said you're not a scholar of these movements and neither am I and that's actually a problem, right?

Because we're trying to address this appearance of a culture war that seems to be manifesting itself first in the universities and then everywhere else, and it’s an amorphous thing; it’s hard to get a grip on, and it’s easy to be wrong. But we’re forced to contend with it regardless and to sketch out its outlines. I’ve been trying to do that as fairly as I possibly can. I mean, part of this proposition seems to be the insistence—the radical insistence—that the Enlightenment insistence on the individual as the primary unit of analysis is to be discarded in favor of a group-centered analysis, and that the only reason that individual—the idea of the transcendent individual—manifest itself was because it served the interests of those who have arbitrary power to maintain it.

Although the logical connection there isn’t clear because it isn’t obvious to me how it served the particular power interests of that group and how it wouldn’t serve the power interests of other groups equally as well seems to be a fundamental flaw in the logic. But I’ve been thinking about my own experience with social institutions and my knowledge of how people develop, as well as how children develop. The first thing or part of that is that all the developmental literature suggests that the use of aggression, which is what you’d expect to be developed if power was the fundamental organizing principle of social institutions, you’d expect that aggressive children would do better than non-aggressive children. And you’d expect that children would be socialized by their superordinate adults—their teachers, their parents—to manifest aggression in the service of power, and that doesn’t seem to be the case developmentally. The children who preferentially use aggression, self-centered aggression in particular, tend to be alienated and unhappy and in a dismal minority and friendless, and then they don’t do well in life at all.

And the developmental course is from more aggression at the very early stages of life to less aggression as adulthood inculcates itself, and so we actually become more civilized as we become more integrated in our social institutions rather than less. And so why do you think the—and then I think about my relationships with, no, I think about two things: people I have admired who’ve been successful in social institutions and then my experience as a apprentice, let’s say, within social institutions.

And first of all, the people I admire and who’ve been successful are not by any stretch of the imagination notable for their manipulation of arbitrary power; quite the contrary, the people that I’ve met who are particularly admirable have done everything they possibly can in their positions of authority and competence to open the door to advancement to people around them, to facilitate their cooperation, to work with them genuinely in a manner that increases the probability that both of them will succeed. They’ve also taken extreme pleasure in the development of their subordinates, so to speak.

And then I thought, well, how is it that our culture has got so bloody warped that we don’t notice that? You talked about the importance of family in your upbringing, and you speak of your family with great affection. I mean, why don’t we believe that the central patriarchal spirit is properly constituted as benevolent father rather than as tyrannical, power-mad, you know, exploiter? Because I don’t see that people who are tyrannical, power-mad exploiters actually do that well in our social institutions. And it also seems to me that it's a primary pleasure to open the door to people who have ability but less opportunity; like it's really—it’s a fundamental motivational pleasure for that to occur.

And I think it's integrally related to the pleasure that people take in fatherhood. And I think, well, I think that’s completely right and it needs to—I think it needs to be said. Well, a couple of things: the first is that this rich view of the individual as having—as really mattering, as being connected intrinsically to the reality itself, you know, "face to face with God," but you see this in the ancient Greeks. You see this all throughout the institutions and philosophical artistic movements of Western culture. I'm not saying not in other cultures; it’s just that this is where I—this is the tradition I know and I'm a bit of a scholar of.

But the point I want to make twofold: first, that these ideas of the individual way predate the Enlightenment, and in many respects the Enlightenment itself, though responsible for many of our clarifications around these things, has also left us with many problems that we’re, I think, going to have to face or we’re finished really fundamentally. And the second thing I want to say is that it's not that thinking about power is not important. I mean, there are very few things in the entire record of human beings thinking about what it means to be a human being—which is essentially what the humanities are, right? I mean it’s just the record of other people thinking about human experience throughout time, whether it’s art or philosophy or theology or logic or architecture. I mean these are the record of the ways in which people have grappled with what the human being is; that’s all the humanities are fundamentally.

But at the heart of that—and there are few things that occupy more bandwidth in that whole long arc of reflection than how one restrains the individual’s own solipsism, it's the individual’s own will to power, the individual’s own closed loop of the self against everything else—which, which it turns out in this rich tradition of reflection, is an extremely bad thing for the individual to do because it’s alienating, because the individual—that it’s short-sighted and it actually runs. See, this is the problem with positing that the drive to power is the central animating principle; to make a fundamental critique that might be expressed in such terms as systemic racism, let's say.

The drive to power and deceit, perhaps, in the service of power is best viewed as an aberration to the central tendency—a powerful aberration and certainly the source of all the fundamental corruption of the central tendency. But it's not to be confused with the central tendency itself, which is more like properly construed, and I think that this is perhaps the central message of the Old Testament, properly construed as something like a benevolent father. I mean the Greeks had their metaphysical reality too.

I spoke with an author this week and a professor of classics at Boston University. The author is Brian Moresky; he wrote a book called "The Immortality Key," and he was talking about the Eleusinian Mysteries and the saturation of Greek culture in this underlying metaphysical religious reality that was manifested in the Eleusinian mysteries and in the Dionysian tradition as well. We talked a little bit about the transformation of the Dionysian into the Christian as a consequence of the union of Greek society and Jewish society. Out of that comes Christianity.

This new conception of man, as akin to divinity in some sense or a recreation of that idea, I’m fumbling for words here, but I’m trying to get a picture of the central animating spirit, because what we’re pushing out of the universities is the idea that we’re fundamentally motivated by group-centered tyranny. And I don’t believe that to be the case. I don’t think that’s what good people are motivated by, and I don’t think that bad people are particularly successful in our social institutions. I think that’s an unbelievable—I think that’s an unbelievably cynical and dangerous way of looking at history, and it’s also a way of looking at history that demolishes your own motivation. Because if the central animating tendency of our social institutions is the expression of tyrannical power, then that’s the defining characteristic of your own ambition.

But if your own ambition is to develop yourself as a noble being who has a broad purview and who finds fundamental pleasure in serving the higher good, well that’s a whole different story. And that story is the critical thing here, and that’s what the universities are supposed to be transmitting, is that central story. If we’re wrong about this, we’re going to tear things down.

Yeah, yeah, well I think I don't think we need to say “we're going to”; I think, in many respects, we have already. Very—you are going to critique the Enlightenment. Well, I think we have already very deeply deconstructed many of the forms of life and culture that actually mediate the individual’s agency and deeper realization. And we were saying a minute ago that, you know, if you look at things simply from the standpoint of power and you analyze individuals by that, I mean, the paradox is that, you know, if you tend only to your own power, you are a disaster—you’re a disaster as a human being, you’re a disaster in relation to others. You end up wildly unhappy and unfulfilled. I mean that is just—that is the price; that’s right, the path downward on every level. It’s not like you can be an individually successful psychopath exploiting everyone and end up hedonically advantaged without suffering; that isn’t how it works.

I've never seen that happen; I don't believe it's possible. And so I can't understand why we've bought the idea that power is the central animating principle; like, what the hell? And why have it—there's an envy in it. There’s an envy in it that I can’t quite put my finger on. It’s related in some sense to this.

You know, I've noticed that in the universities, whenever I worked with business people, for example, a lot of my peers would become upset with me, and I always wondered why that was, because my sense was, well, there was just as many good people and bad people in business, let’s say, as there were good people and bad people in academia. It was just completely foolish to draw an arbitrary line. But it had something to do with envy. I was talking to Paul Rossi, you know, the New York teacher who got nailed for first standing up against the importation of critical race theory, let’s say, into the private schools in New York, and he talked about the attraction that postmodern theory had for him when he was an undergraduate. He wanted to be a writer but he didn't really have the talent, as far as he was concerned, and along came the postmodern critics who were tearing literature apart, and they appealed to his resentment and his envy because they were tearing apart, you know, an ideal he couldn’t reach.

And so it was very reminiscent for me of the story of Cain, you know, who became resentful and bitter because his sacrifices weren’t accepted by God. It's the fundamental story of human beings, really. And so there's this envy that's driving us to misinterpret our institutions and to be careless with them, and the universities seem to be leading the pack, I would say, more than leading.

Yeah, certainly, yes, certainly leading, racing onwards. I think that, you know, one of the terrible ironies of this standpoint is that it becomes guilty of the very things that it accuses in others, and so it violates our institutional life; it violates our whole relation to the past; it violates the individual. That is to say, when you drink the Kool-Aid of there being only power all the way down, you are in a grim world. And what is I think so tragically perverse about the dismissal of our whole inherited past, with all of its complexity and beauty and difficulty, is that the tradition itself of all of humanistic learning has many of the very tools we need to confront the problems that those who are concerned with the abuse of power are concerned about.

And so the—and I think revolutions often work in this way—is that the first thing they need to do is alienate the entire record of the past from the present, because that's the basis upon which you bring in the brave new world, you know, through your own manipulation of power and system and so on and so forth. So I don't—I mean, I think there are a number of things going on. It's always very tempting; I mean, the siren song of power is a kind of drug-like character to that.

But I think, Jordan, we need to ask: why is it that these reductive, inadequate, manifestly ahistorical, irrational, utterly, you know, low-grade kinds of analysis have become so dominant? And I think if we can't answer that question, it is difficult to transcend their hold on those who ascribe to them.

Well, you said that the woke phenomena is an index of the vast longing/hunger of our moment. I mean, the other thing, one of the other things that Rossi said that was quite interesting was that when the new doctrines entered the private school that he was teaching, he was initially highly supportive of them because they came in flying, let’s say, the anti-racist flag. And like who isn’t happy about anti-racism? And so if you take it at face value, well, then you get to put yourself on the side of the heroes that are fighting against those who oppress people on the basis of arbitrary characteristics like their race. And so that certainly accounts for some of the attraction on the positive side.

I mean, the negative side is, well, the opportunity to tear things down for the sake of tearing them down in the name of some higher moral virtue that just covers the real motivation, which is to tear things down because you’re envious. But, you know, to give the devil his due, well, there's something to be said for working identifying with a movement that purports to be serving the interests of the poor and the dispossessed and those who are prejudiced against, and to take to task those who are perpetrators of such things. And so I see that as part of a religious impulse to do the good, but it's so incomplete and it's so dangerous in its incompleteness because, well, partly because it provides a, say, too convenient enemy, and partly because it does dispense with the richness of the past.

And then it brings with it and it’s in its wake, let’s say, all sorts of ideas that are entirely counterproductive. I mean it contains within it a fundamental critique of the idea of free market economies, for example, which to me is just a disaster. Just from a computational perspective, we can't do with central planning what the market can do with computation because it’s distributed and it relies on the choices of everyone; it’s a much more effective computational system. But we seem to have done a pretty bad job of defending it.

Well, I think that’s a very, very good statement of the problem. Why is that so? I mean it’s—well, let’s say a few things. The first is that I do think the whole woke thing—which, you know, for whatever I mean—it's for whatever, whether that what that even means is, I think, a good question to dig into fairly carefully. But I think it is an index of a search for meaning in it in a deep sense, at least for many.

Of course, there are many people who just cynically take things up; they know it’s a power move, it’s a power political move, they know what they’re doing full well. It’s wrong; it’s reductive; it destroys people’s lives; we know that's what's at work there—there are always people who will do this. But in a much larger sense, I don't think that's an adequate analysis. I think that at a larger level, it is an index for a search for meaning, and we, I think need to remember Aristotle's fundamental insight into the human psyche, which is that you know one is only ever moved by some kind of a perceived good.

You—that's why for Dante, you know, you go down to the bottom of hell, which is just an allegory for him about this life, not a vision of the afterlife; you know things are frozen, there’s no movement at all because the good of intellect, or even any perceived good, however limitedly or obscurely perceived, is gone; it's just frozen. And so whenever there's any action at all, it’s because there’s some kind of a perceived good at work, even if that is completely misperceived. I’m saying it’s a perceived good; we never do anything at all. You don’t go up to make yourself a sandwich or go get the mail or say hello to anyone without some kind of a perceived good.

And so the second thing I would say is that I think we need to think of times when there is a significant amount of momentum behind something. It could be national socialism in the '20s and '30s in Germany; it could be the movement to Scottish independence in our own day; it could be the so-called woke movement, Black Lives Matter, whatever lens we want to look at this from. We need to really honestly ask ourselves the question: what is moving in this?

And I think it’s clearly the case that from what I understand about the formation of the complicated historical movements that led to the Second World War that there was, in Germany at least, I would be very surprised to learn this is not the case, a vulnerability to an ideological standpoint that gave a defining collective purpose. And that seems to me to indicate a lack of that not being done in a better way. You could say the same thing—I suspect about Scottish independence—is it really that Scottish independence, or is it that—well, you know, if you were in Canada in Quebec and you were a lapsed Catholic, a French Catholic, you were four times as likely to be a separatist during the separatist uprising, say, in the 1980s and ‘90s in Canada, or 1960s through the 1990s. The Gallup poll indicated that.

And so, you know, Quebec was the last place in Western Europe in some sense that, so to speak, where Catholicism dissolved—and that didn't happen until the late 1950s—and it was instantly replaced by a radical nationalism which really—I mean, I watched it from the outside. I was in Quebec for much of that. It was impenetrable; you could see that it was a displaced religious doctrine. The state had taken the place of Christ—that's the simplest way of putting it.

Well, that’s a great—I think that’s a great—that’s a great historical example. I mean, I think that, at a minimum, what many people perceive in these sort of so-called woke movements is at least some incipient or inchoate vision of justice, that, you know, the least of these among us matters, the different among us matters.

Now, of course, I think that the standpoint that is, through which these things are viewed, is completely tragic and unfulfillable of the—the ends that it seems to bring about. But what—you know, the Conservatives and, you know, free market lovers and all these people very often lament the fact—they say, why is it that, you know, this we call it the Left? Call it whatever you want—seems to beat us on the moral argument every time despite the fact that we know that our systems and the ideas that we espouse historically have been shown to be superior to the very values that the so-called Left is beating us at.

And I think that this does raise the fact that, you know, I’ve been reading the Toope’s wonderful coffee table book. I know you had a wonderful conversation with him recently about, you know, how much better everything is getting in absolute terms. And you know, these are wonderful achievements; we should all rejoice and absolutely face them and be glad for them and the things that they will make possible. But it is also very interesting to note what is not in Toope. I mean, there's no talk about beauty. There's no talk about architecture; there’s no talk about cultural achievement; there’s no talk about—let’s put it this way—there is no talk about many of the things that are most fundamental to the meaning in human life.

And that’s not to degrade or denigrate the achievements that are being spoken about there, but it is rather to say that if your metric for human flourishing is do we have enough to eat and are we not getting rained on, and you know, you go through these lists of fundamentally material things—all of which are fundamentally important and not only because they’re material because there’s also a spiritual dimension to those things for human beings—but the point I’m making is that you see the same thing in Stephen Pinker’s work, like "The Blank Slate." I’m sorry; I hope I’ve got this right because I’ve read a couple of Pinker’s books. But one of the things—so he thinks very much like Toope thinks, and he wrote "The Better Angels of Our Nature," if I remember correctly, showing that human aggression has decreased substantially over the last number of centuries.

But all of the qualities of humanity that you describe are sort of—they're parsed off near the end of the book into a single chapter as if they’re just secondary side effects of some more profound rationality, let’s say. And it's the rationality that's concentrating on material well-being, and I don't have anything against material well-being and the elimination of privation but there is—and it’s interesting that you make that comment about Toope’s work—that the spiritual dimension—it’s like the list of what should be attended to to have a meaningful life that I listed at the beginning of our talk at the end I capped that off with some attention to be paid for the spiritual or moral or religious element of life, to bring everything together.

That narrow focus on material well-being, necessary though it is, does seem to lack—to it, there’s something in it that’s missing that, if it’s missing, undermines the whole project or appears to.

Well, I think the bottom line is that there is no deep human realization for any individual outside of understanding her or himself in relation to higher order principles, truths, realities. I mean, that's just what human beings are. So that is not to denigrate the necessity of improvement in all these areas that Toope so brilliantly chronicles. I don’t portray myself as somehow anti-Toope; I’m a huge fan of the inclusive institutions that they describe as necessary to human flourishing. But I think it needs to be said that in the most developed places, so-called developed places of the world, skepticism about those inclusive institutions is higher than anywhere else, or at least arguably so.

I think it needs to be said that there’s nothing in the book about the very disturbing trends of rising suicide, of rising, although dopamine addiction, of porn addiction in young men—especially these are—and I think it needs to be said that many of these things that appear to be very fundamental miles of contemporary life are also related to technology. One of the paradoxes, I think, that I love to ask you about, Jordan, relative to your own work on the individual and human individual realization, is that if on the one hand human beings are becoming increasingly liberated from the demands of material necessity—I mean the amount of time it took to create light, for example, was an immense amount of work, or created to save up enough calories to make it through a winter—all of these just this bone-grindingly hard aspect of human existence for millennia—then we are very rapidly in the last two centuries.

Now, almost every human being on the planet—not everyone, but the vast majority—are living at standards of living that were inconceivable by anyone just a few centuries ago. So these are amazing achievements, but it also needs to be said that insofar as, on the one hand, the individual is being liberated from those bone-crushing realities, at the same time it does appear to be a key aspect of modern life that individuals are finding themselves less connected, more alienated, and that the very technology in some respects that liberates them also appears to homogenize in a kind of globally reductive way, such that, you know, as human life is lived on the ground, the frame in which it's actually lived and in which meaning is derived—has become more distant, harder to access, and that we have far fewer of the tools we might have once had to make sense of that all-important sphere.

I've talked to Bjorn Lomborg and to Matt Ridley and to Marion Toope and to other people who are deeply concerned about continuing to make absolute privation, let’s say, a thing of the past and to many people as well, who are hoping to ameliorate relative privation which is more the concern of the left, as you already pointed out. And all of these people are also aware—and Stephen Fry for that matter—you know, Stephen has allied himself to some degree with the four horsemen of the atheist world and is a dramatist, and so understands, at least in his bones, the necessity of this underlying poetic, dramatic, religious, humanistic matrix out of which rationality has emerged, and in which rationality must remain embedded.

I mean, what it looks like to me is that—and I see this dawning realization among people like Richard Dawkins as well, at least by proxy—talking to people who know him, and watching what's happened to him with the humanists, for example, who attacked him, is that this insistence on pure rationality and pure enlightenment rationality doesn't address the fundamental religious impulse. And the hope was among the four horsemen of the atheist world, let's say, that once we dispensed with this irrational superstition, we'd all become materialist rationalists, you know, of the intellectual caliber of Stephen Pinker. But that isn’t what's happening. I don't believe that can be the case.

What happens instead is that all sorts of things that religion should be separated from—the higher life, the spiritual life, the religious life—all of that falls down a level or two, and pure politics becomes contaminated with the religious impulse, and then it becomes totalizing, and that looks like a catastrophe. And so it seems to me that we need to pull up the spiritual domain again, to parse it off as a separate field of endeavor, study, hope to give it its due, and that that’s the role, at least in part, that the university should be playing. Instead, they’re tearing things down.

Yeah, and I think it needs to be said. I mean these technologies are an amazing tool. That's what it is; it is a tool. It does not have a moral value in itself, you know. It's—and it’s in—there’s no question that it largely—well, it is morally in what is the word I’m looking for? It doesn't have a moral determination intrinsic to itself. But that’s to say, even from the standpoint of this kind of narrow instrumental rationalism, you still are putting this in service of something that you think is good; that you think is good.

You know, it's good to feed people, but you know, you have to ask yourself, you know, why do we think peace is better than war? Or why is it that forgiveness is better than vengeance? Or that unity is better than disunity? Or that beauty is better than ugliness? And this is the point that I know we both are very keen about. Maybe we can talk about beauty in a minute, but the point I'm making is that it’s twofold.

So that's relevant to that central animating spirit of mankind, let's say, because that central animating spirit accepts all those propositions that you just laid out as givens—that beauty is preferable to ugliness, that unity is preferable to disunity, that life more abundant is preferable to privation. And that’s all part of our central ethic, and that’s part of the central ethic of our properly functioning institutions as well. And it's part of the central ethic that enables us to communicate about what's good and what's evil, and it's part of the central ethic that allows our consciences to torment us when we deviate from that path.

And that’s not merely a matter of aberration from a central power drive.

Yeah, I mean, I think there's a real question. You know, the world at large could very easily become a technological order set over a moral vacuum, and this is not to denigrate the technology but actually it will destroy itself. Right? That’s what I mean? It’s very easy to point that out! I mean you know we can—you know, the national socialist was a very largely technological regime. You know nuclear war is the creation of technology. You know the gene-modifying technology, biowarfare—these are all things that are either there or almost there with the capacity to wreak unimaginable suffering on the entire planet because of the technology.

That’s not to say that technology is bad; it is to say rather that it must take its place relative to a higher order series of conversations. And what I absolutely want to insist on is that those higher order conversations they’re not mere intuitions; they're not mere, you know, speculative "oh we can just kind of see the entrails of a goose" or something. They’re also not mere expressions of the arbitrary desire for power, because that’s exactly the animating spirit. That isn’t why you built RAWs; that isn’t why you’re trying to build Ralston College. It isn’t to fulfill your own desire for power. That’s not a good motivation; it’s not pleasing; it doesn’t last; it’s not enriching.

It’s what people turn to when they’re bitter and cynical.

[Music]

Hello everyone, I’m pleased to have with me today Dr. Stephen Blackwood, who’s the founding president of Ralston College, a newly founded university in Savannah, Georgia. Dr. Blackwood was one of the founders of Saint George’s Youth Net, an educational mentoring program for inner-city youth in the North End district of Halifax, Nova Scotia, and was subsequently a teaching fellow in the foundation year program at the University of King’s College, which is one of Canada’s finest undergraduate institutions.

Blackwood hosted and moderated a conversation between Sir Roger Scruton and I at Cambridge University in November of 2018, and moderated the debate Happiness: Capitalism Versus Marxism between Slavoj Žižek and I on April 19, 2019. Dr. Blackwood lectures and specializes in the history of philosophy, especially Boethius. He also hosts the Ralston College podcast, which has featured guests including Douglas Murray, the physicist Freeman Dyson, Andrew Doyle, the online satirist and author, and Theodore Dell Rempel, who wrote Our Culture: What’s Left of It, among many other books. Oxford University Press published his book The Consolation of Boethius: As Poetic Liturgy in 2015.

Welcome, Dr. Blackwood. Stephen, it’s really good to see you. Thanks for agreeing to talk to me today.

Thanks for having me, and Jordan. It’s great to see you again. I think the last time we... yeah, I think the last time we actually saw each other, I believe, was during the debate with Slavoj Žižek, is that correct?

That is right. I think it is right, yeah. So it’s about two years ago. So maybe I could ask you first of all about the inner-city youth program in the North End of Halifax. I don’t know that story, so that might be a nice place to start.

Well, I grew up in Eastern Canada—in a place that you would know but perhaps not all of your listeners know, in Prince Edward Island—in a sort of pastoral, quiet, sleepy, very rural place and a small family farm in a huge—well, comparatively by historic standards, a huge family—seven younger brothers and two younger sisters, my parents—the milk cow. I don’t want to paint too idyllic a picture; everyone knows family life and farm life has all kinds of ups and downs. But the point I’m trying to make is that I had a very kind of intensely wonderful, rich, and very actively busy childhood. It set me up in many respects for the discovery of philosophy when I went to college, and I had the immeasurable gift of meeting some teachers who just opened worlds to me. I mean, you know what a teacher can do and be having had them yourself and having been one for so many people.

I really fell in love with trying to think deeply about fundamental matters, and not that I was pretty good at it by any means, but just that it was eye-opening for me to see that things I had perhaps intuited in my childhood about the nature of things—in some deep sense, we all have these intuitions, whether through nature or music or love or family life or whatever—that there were ways of thinking about those things. I spent quite a long time with some wonderful teachers, particularly in the ancient Greek and Latin, and then medieval tradition, thinking about things, particularly about the nature of the human individual and what it really is—what its realization is.

Anyway, I mentioned all that because when I came to the end of my master’s degree, I’d gone straight through doing a lot of thinking work in a wonderful community. It needs to be said, I just had kind of, in a way, had my fill of ideas. I had kind of tapped out; I had gone as far as I could in the theoretical at that point, and I needed to re-engage in the—not I wouldn't say the real world, but in the more—you know, the more the world of activity and action. I had a dear friend and mentor of mine named Gary Thorne, who was the priest at an inner-city parish called Saint George's Church in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and he had been with others—including one of my sisters—working in the inner city thinking about which was, I should say, a very rough and highly dysfunctional place, the North End of Halifax, that is or was and in some respects still is—but not least because of an absolutely catastrophic civic decision.

There was a place in Halifax called Africville, a Black community that though perhaps was not entirely up to contemporary standards in terms of technology and things, was a vibrant place. Duke Ellington had played there; it was a flourishing community. Anyway, the city wanted to build a new bridge, and part of the foundations of the bridge they wanted to put in Africville. So at least that's the story I've understood from my own reading about it. They uprooted this entire very vibrant community out of the place that had been called Africville and resettled them into pretty dismal inner-city housing in the North End, and that was not by any means I think the only factor but a very significant moment in the devastation of a community.

When I was there in the late '90s into early 2000s, the mid-'90s to early 2000s, there were very many serious problems, from drug and alcohol abuse to prostitution, devastatedly broken families. My friend Gary Thorne and others had been thinking about what modest—you know, one doesn’t think one can solve these really very serious problems. You know, simply walk out and solve them; they're really hard—but what could the parish, that I say this community, do that might be meaningful? So I was with a group of people involved in setting up a small, very small, this is a small community, but small youth mentoring and life skills program called Saint George's Youth Net. The idea was to be a kind of network that would help pick these children up when they fell and to give them—well, our observation, Father Thorne’s observation, had been over many years that if you wait until someone has already fallen through the cracks, it’s in many respects—and this is a terrible thing to say, I know—but in many respects too late. It's very hard to reach people—not that it's impossible. I believe in redemption; I believe in the whole possibility of things being turned around, right down to the most—you know, tiniest fibers of my being. But the point is that it is very, very hard to do that with someone who’s 16 or 17 or 18 already fallen out of—you know, dropped out of school or had a baby or whatever.

So we thought about ways of what we could do to expand the horizons of these children and youth of all ages—really, but starting with them as young as school age—and working with them. I won’t go on at length about this but what I learned was a couple of things that are still really, really with me today. The first is that human realization of the individual has to come down at a very fundamental level to the individual. Like no one else can live your life for you. You know, no one else can kind of come in and just do it for you. That would deny all of the agency that is at the heart of human fulfillment and the driving force of this meanness of life has to come from me. In a way, I think that's a standpoint that, at some loose level, people would call the political right, seems to understand that. You know there has to be agency; it's fundamental. And yet that is a totally incomplete standpoint at the same time, because we don’t simply throw children out into the woods and say, "All right, come back when you’re fully formed, you know, writing books and playing the flute and fully able to take on the complexities of life."

And my son took that as well.

Oh, that’s right, yeah. So tell us about that.

Saving the Humanities | Stephen Blackwood | EP 188

More Articles